I feel like I’m living in a fairyland, I really do. There’s a prince who has yet to turn into a frog, my fabulous agent has been a bit like a fairy godmother (for my book rather than for me, but shh), and while I’m certainly working for the money I earn, the money being reliably there is like a friendly woodland creature bringing me shiny things, such as sushi and vacations. (Okay, I don’t know how well this analogy is working.)

Not to say there haven’t been ups and downs–there have–but the downs feel like gentle dips, not the terrifying plunges that were all too possible just a couple of years ago. And I’m doing everything I can to keep those plunges from coming back. Even fairylands have monsters in the woods, but usually they aren’t invincible… so picture me training in a meadow in my fairyland, with a sword or a bow and arrow. If I’m ever in need of rescuing again, maybe I’ll be able to do it myself.

I don’t have much to report on the writing front. To Disturb the Universe has been on submission for about two weeks. It’s a little bit nervewracking when I let myself actually think about it, but fortunately I’ve been so busy that I don’t have time to worry about it much.

Meanwhile, the illusions novel is in the works. (It doesn’t have a proper title yet, partly because it can’t decide whether it wants to be a single book or a trilogy.) A few months ago, I thought I was ready to start writing the first draft, but now I really think I need to do more planning first. I’m hoping to make some solid progress on putting together a more detailed plot outline (bearing in mind that something like “they become friends” is a character arc and not a plot point) in the next month and a half.

(title quote: “Dog Days Are Over,” Florence and the Machine)

Previously, there was this contest on a really awesome blog, the first 250 words of my novel caught the eye of Ammi-Joan Paquette of the Erin Murphy Literary Agency, and she ended up asking for the full manuscript. I sent it off and waited.

In the meantime, I sent off other queries, two or three at a time, tweaking my query letter in between batches. None of those agents bit, or even nibbled. I got a couple of rejections that looked a little personalized when I squinted. That was it.

Eight weeks later, Joan’s response arrived: she loved To Disturb the Universe but had some concerns about its commercial appeal, and would I be willing to talk on the phone? The revisions she suggested seemed like a lot at the time, but in retrospect, the most drastic thing I had to do was cut out a subplot. (It might have worked as a standalone story, but didn’t mesh well with the other plot threads.) I should probably mention that this was the last part of my final semester of college. Somehow, I managed to avoid getting distracted by revisions. Once I had finally graduated, I got to work, duly excised the misfit subplot, and got a couple of friends to read the result. Two months after the phone call, I took a deep breath and sent the novel back.

That summer was mostly pretty terrible, for reasons I won’t go into here. I desperately wanted something, anything, to go right, and I was hoping that this would be it. Despite everything bad that had happened and kept happening, maybe I would get an agent. Maybe I would come closer to publishing a novel–something I had been dreaming of, and working toward, ever since I was thirteen years old. Or maybe, a voice inside my head whispered, it’ll be a rejection, and then what will you do? Rationally, I knew that accumulating a dozen rejections or so meant very little, and that there were still plenty of agents I could query if Joan decided to pass. But this was the first time that a door in the publishing world had opened even a little bit for me. I didn’t want it to close.

The three-month mark came closer. A few days before I would have sent a status query, Joan emailed me with a second, much more extensive revise-and-resubmit request. (When I copied her notes into Word so that I could annotate them a bit, they were three pages long single-spaced.) I had thought I had done everything I could to make To Disturb the Universe shine. Joan’s notes made me realize that my book could be even better than I had ever imagined. The thought of more waiting was a bit terrifying, but I was excited, too. I rolled up my sleeves, got to work, and wrote 14,000 words in a single week. For once, unemployment was working in my favor. In all, I wrote 20,000 new words and cut about 9,000.

In November, after my critique partners gave the thumbs up, I sent version three to Joan. The waiting began again, and I was every bit as neurotic about it the second time around. But one fine day, it came to an end. I stared at the unopened email for a good five minutes before I opened it. Frantic IMs were sent.

3:37 PM
me: SETH
SETH
the agent just responded do I open the email oh God

3:41 PM
… omg.

Joan was traveling at that point, so The Call happened about a week later, after I got home from work. Joan was lovely and gracious, and I babbled a lot. Afterward, I waited for… not happiness, I was already happy, but a feeling of difference. As if, having become agented, I would now evolve like a Pokemon. But I was, and am, the same person I had been two weeks before. It’s very strange, but also liberating in a way: if I’ve come this far by taking one step at a time, I feel a bit more ready for everything that’s coming next.

This post is already forever long, but I have to say one more thing: thank you! To my friends, for reading the novel (more than once, in some cases) and helping me make it stronger, and for celebrating with me over the past few weeks. And to everyone who’s sent congratulations and good wishes, for lifting my spirits even higher than they already were. I’m excited to meet more fellow writers, and I hope some of you will stay in touch.

(title quote: “If You Only Knew,” Kathryn Calder)

Maybe I should back up: I have an agent! Recently, I accepted an offer of representation from the amazing Ammi-Joan Paquette at the Erin Murphy Literary Agency. I am ridiculously excited.

For the non-writers reading this: getting an agent is the first step on one possible path to publishing a novel. (Not the path–there are several ways to pursue publication, which could be a blog post in itself–but definitely the one I decided would work best for me.) Many large publishing houses won’t even consider a novel that isn’t represented by an agent… or if they do consider unagented manuscripts, their slush pile is scarily enormous. A reputable, skillful agent can connect a great manuscript with the editors who are most likely to champion it. In addition, in the event that a publisher does offer to buy the book, a good agent can negotiate the best deal for her client. Some agents also work with their clients to revise their manuscripts before sending them out into the world.

So, in January 2011, when I was reasonably happy with To Disturb the Universe (aka the protospace novel), I knew that I wanted to find an agent. I had a list of agents to query–that is, send a short letter describing the book and possibly some sample pages–so it was just a matter of psyching myself up to actually do it. At around this time, I stumbled across the blog Miss Snark’s First Victim, run by the anonymous (and wonderful!) Authoress, and saw that the blog’s monthly Secret Agent contest was about to begin. The contests work like this: entrants send the first 250 words of their manuscript to Authoress, who posts all the entries on the blog. Entries are open to critique from anyone, and every entry will definitely receive a critique from that month’s Secret Agent. After a few days, the agent reveals his identity and awards prizes to the entries he liked best (usually things like “send me your first 50 pages,” sometimes a critique of a longer portion of the manuscript).

I decided to enter… why not, right? It actually turned out to be pretty stressful. Once my entry went up on the blog, I refreshed the page so often that Google Chrome put it on my “most visited” list. Slowly, the comments from strangers rolled in. They were pretty evenly split between “this is awesome!” and “what in the world is going on?” Alas, the Secret Agent was in the latter category.

So, why am I telling this story? A couple of days after the contest started, Authoress made a post saying that more agents were reading the entries, and asking to be put in touch with some of the entries’ authors. “Well, that definitely won’t be me,” I thought. I had basically decided to chalk the whole thing up as an interesting learning experience and move forward with querying as originally planned.

But then I got an email from Authoress: Ammi-Joan Paquette wanted to see the first three chapters of my manuscript. Cue a lot of flailing on my part. Having looked Joan up and confirmed that, yes, it would be fairly awesome if she represented me, I sent off my chapters and crossed my fingers. Three weeks later, Joan emailed me to ask for the full manuscript. More flailing, full manuscript sent, fingers crossed again.

On March 4, 2011, I wrote the following in my journal: “In two weeks, I could have an agent.” Several months later, I looked back at this and burst out laughing. Oh, my sweet summer child.

To be continued…

ETA: Part 2 is up.

(title quote: “Don’t Let Your Feet Touch Ground,” Ash Koley)

I’d like to focus on one particular quote from her post: “While butt in chair time is the root of all writing, not all butt in chair time is equal.” If you’re a writer, unless you’re so disciplined that you’re writing instead of reading this post, this will probably ring true. There are times when my focus is like unto a fricking laser, and there are times when I’m sort of thinking about maybe writing, but then Facebook exists.

So, what makes the laser-like times different? Everyone’s answer to this will probably be different, but for me, one important factor is having a definite goal to work toward. When I was hitting 2-3k a day for that one shining week last September, I had a list of revisions I needed to make, and I could more or less go after them systematically. (It didn’t hurt that by that point, I knew the protospace novel inside and out.)

Accountability, on the other hand, doesn’t seem to help me much. When my critique group was running the “700 words a day or shame” list, it didn’t make much of a difference to my overall productivity. Likewise, keeping a spreadsheet, which I started at around the same time, was just kind of depressing.

At any rate, right now, I’ve got a shiny new novel idea, and I’m doing my best to flesh it out into something that makes sense. The problem is that “plan a novel” is a very broad goal, and word count isn’t necessarily the best measure of progress. What to do?

Here’s where mindfulness comes in. I work at a consulting firm, and it’s vital that I track how much time I spend on each project I’m involved in. Tracking my time not only lets my employer know how much to charge our clients, it helps me focus my attention on the job at hand. If I take a break, I have to let the time-tracking software know, and this small action forces me to be conscious of what exactly I’m doing with myself all day.

With all of this in mind, I’m going to divide “plan a novel” into goals that are somewhat more discrete, and I’ve installed a time-tracking program (Grindstone, if you’re curious) on my computer at home.  For the next week, I’m going to use it when I’m writing, and see if time-tracking is equally effective for me when creative work is involved. It might turn out to be more stressful than helpful, but I think it’s worth a try.

Has anyone else found accountability tricks that work for them? Also, if anyone wants to play along with the time-tracking experiment this week, let me know.

Nine smiling Alphans (there should have been eleven, but I failed at framing the shot) around a table at the Tick Tock Diner in New York City.

Seven Alphans around Yumi’s kitchen table. On the table: the Battlestar Galactica board and about twenty billion different cards and tokens. Seth is facepalming. In related news, the Cylons won.

(title quote: “Your Hands (Together),” The New Pornographers)

And it’s not like I’m the only writer on the planet who’s dealt with college or a full-time job. As an economist friend of mine would say, this is a solved problem. There are ways to write quickly (well, more quickly than I do right now), and do it well, even when it seems like life should get in the way. I just haven’t found them yet, so I’m hoping someone reading this will have some insight.

I was talking to my friend Isaac today about the very intriguing novel he has in the works, and eventually the conversation turned to the writing process. If you’re a writer, then you’ve almost certainly talked with other writers about writing, and you’re probably familiar with the plotting vs. pantsing “debate.” (I put “debate” in quotes because I haven’t seen anyone argue that one or the other is universally best.) Some writers are plotters, planning everything out to the last detail before they start writing the story itself, and others write by the seat of their pants, and make it up as they go.

Isaac is a plotter: his goal is to come up with an outline that’s detailed enough that he can write the actual novel without having to stop and fill in any gaps. My method is a bizarre hybrid of the two approaches: for the protospace novel, I came up with a general outline, wrote a bit, realized that the unwritten part of the outline was dumb, scrapped it, re-outlined the rest of the story, wrote some more, hit a wall again, re-outlined, and so on. In short, I have to pretend to myself that I know where the story is going, though in reality, I probably don’t.

As I was trying to explain this to Isaac, I ended up agreeing that my method of writing is, in fact, horribly inefficient.

Efficiency is a strange word. It conjures up images of assembly lines and accounting, but I’m an economist, so I should know better. Efficiency is about optimizing allocation of resources: in this case, my time and creative energy.

I wanted to write 75,000 words this year, and halfway through February, my word count stands more or less at 0. If I want to meet this goal–or even a new goal, adjusted downward to account for the new job–I’ll probably have to change something about the way I work. My guess is that I should try one of two things: either fully embrace plotting and save myself the trouble of running into walls, or turn to the pants side and stop pretending that I know what I’m doing. Then again, the plotting-pantsing axis isn’t the only dimension of the writing process, and I plan to give some thought to the others very soon… just not tonight.

Any thoughts?

1. A coffee shop down the street from my office serves bubble tea.

2. I also found a Barnes and Noble about two blocks away.

3. There’s a farmer’s market practically next door, which is open two days a week and has delicious, cheap Indian food.

4. On Fridays, there are free Dunkin Donuts in the break room. I upgraded my feelings about this from pleasure to ALL THE EXCITEMENT when I discovered that some of the donuts were Vanilla Creme.

5. This company is awesome, and I am excited to be part of the work they are doing. (That should probably be closer to the top.)

6. While I was up here looking for apartments, I bought a SmarTrip card, which is like a debit card for the DC metro. The other day, I was on my way home, and when I tapped the card against the sensor (which you can do without taking your card out of your wallet, a feature I definitely appreciate), the readout told me I only had $1 left. This was distressing because 1) that’s not enough to get from U Street to my stop, so 2) I thought I would have to pay exitfare, which was problematic because 3) the exitfare machines only take cash and I didn’t have any. Turns out, I didn’t have to pay exitfare! The SmarTrip card just had a negative balance and I made up for it when I reloaded the card. In conclusion: SMARTRIP CARDS.

7. I am less than a week away from actually having money. This one should probably be closer to the top as well.

8. Not strictly related to DC or the new job, but several of my friends placed in the Dell Magazines Award! Congratulations to Rachel, Lara, Maddy, Rebecca, and Lily.

(title quote: “So Begins Our Alabee,” Of Montreal)

For a week or so, everything was nice and peaceful in Sarah-land. One of my major worries had been resolved. Finally, I was done with waiting by the phone (or by my Gmail accounts) for people to make decisions that would have a huge impact on my life. Right?

Not so fast, action girl. Turns out I still have to find a place to live. And because even a studio apartment near a metro stop that’s reasonably close to my office costs roughly the monthly budget of a small developing country, that means looking for roommates. I have stressed, second-guessed myself, and generally worried so much that I’ve been just about ready to set something on fire. (I should probably note that this is a metaphor.)

You know what? I’m still pretty stressed. But yesterday I went out and took a walk, and I bought a copy of Legend by Marie Lu and a bag of Goldfish crackers, and then I read and snacked instead of watching the State of the Union address. And tonight I’m going to read some of the materials my supervisor sent me, and maybe think about the new novel* a bit. Everything will be okay.

* Yes, this is the same new novel that I talked about lo these many months ago, in my very first blog entry on this website. It will continue to be “the new novel” until I’ve written at least three chapters. Sigh.

(title quote)

I only have a few resolutions this year, but here they are:

1. To keep writing. I’ve tentatively set a goal of around 75,000 words for the year. According to my spreadsheet, I’ve written around 45k in the last four months, so even assuming (hoping!) that I will be significantly busier in 2012, I think this is realistic.
2. To read more. I’d like to read at least two books a month (fiction or nonfiction) and at least two short stories a week.
3. To believe in myself even when the universe doesn’t seem to agree.

Happy New Year, everyone! I’ll leave you with this quote from Neil Gaiman (which you’ve probably seen, but I thought this poster version was pretty cool):

[The image is by dreamripples and the text is as follows: "May your coming year be filled with magic and dreams and good madness. I hope you read some fine books and kiss someone who thinks you're wonderful, and don't forget to make some art -- write or draw or build or sing or live as only you can. And I hope, somewhere in the next year, you surprise yourself. - Neil Gaiman" ]

(title quote)

1. What did you do in 2011 that you’d never done before?
Lots of things! The first thing to come to mind is job interviews. (I had interviewed for internships and things before, but those interviews didn’t last for two hours, nor did they involve flying to other cities.)

2. Did you keep your new year’s resolutions, and will you make more for next year?
I didn’t make resolutions last year. I’m still thinking about whether I’d like to do so for 2012.

3. Did anyone close to you give birth?
Nope.

4. Did anyone close to you die?
My grandfather on my dad’s side, and my grandmother on my mom’s side.

5. What countries did you visit?
None, but I did make it to several states (California, Massachusetts, New York, and DC).

6. What would you like to have in 2012 that you lacked in 2011?
Among other things, a job.

7. What date from 2011 will remain etched upon your memory, and why?
May 13, when I graduated from Vanderbilt.

8. What was your biggest achievement of the year?
See #7. Receiving an honorable mention in the Dell Magazines Award was also pretty cool.

9. What was your biggest failure?
I failed in all the usual small ways this year. I could think of certain other things as failures.  In my better moments, I prefer to think of them as future successes in progress.

10. Did you suffer illness or injury?
Other than a mild cold a few weeks ago, nothing memorable.

11. What was the best thing you bought?
After graduation, for the first time in my life, I got a car. I’m still not a huge fan of driving, but there’s a lot to be said for having transportation of one’s own.

12. Whose behavior merited celebration?
My friends have been amazing, especially during the difficult times.

13. Whose behavior made you appalled and depressed?
Why in the world would I talk about that on my blog?

14. Where did most of your money go?
See #11.

15. What did you get really, really, really excited about?
Job interviews. Being on staff at Alpha. Various bits of good writing-related news.

16. What song will always remind you of 2011?
“Shake It Out” by Florence and the Machine.

17. Compared to this time last year, are you:
I. happier or sadder?
Sadder, unfortunately, but answering these questions has reminded me that a lot of good things did happen this year.

II. thinner or fatter?
About the same.

III. richer or poorer?
Poorer, but hopefully that won’t last.

18. What do you wish you’d done more of?
Job applications. Reading. Keeping up with the news.

19. What do you wish you’d done less of?
Freaking out about the future. I’m reading The Left Hand of Darkness right now, and I found a quote that I have a feeling I’ll be referring back to a lot: “To learn which questions are unanswerable, and not to answer them: this skill is most needful in times of stress and darkness.”

20. How did you spend Christmas?
With my family.

21. If you had 2011 to do over again, knowing what you know now, would you live it differently?
“Ah! that is clearly a metaphysical speculation, and like most metaphysical speculations has very little reference at all to the actual facts of real life, as we know them.”

22. Did you fall in love in 2011?
Not this time.

23. How many one-night stands?
Ha!

24. What was your favorite TV program?
Game of Thrones. If things that were actually released in 2010 count, as of this month, I am a bit obsessed with Sherlock.

25. Do you hate anyone now that you didn’t hate this time last year?
See #13.

26. What was the best book you read?
Swordspoint, by Ellen Kushner. And though I won’t finish them in 2011, I’m really enjoying The Left Hand of Darkness and Welcome to Bordertown.

27. What was your greatest musical discovery?
Hmm… I’ll go with Florence and the Machine.

28. What did you want and get?
A bit of outside assurance that I haven’t been completely wasting my time with this whole “getting other people to read my writing someday” thing.

29. How many crushes did you develop on strangers in 2011?
That’s not really something that typically happens to me.

30. What was your favorite film of this year?
… Wow, I didn’t see many movies at all this year. X-Men: First Class was pretty entertaining, despite failing at women.

31. What did you do on your birthday, and how old were you?
I turned 22. I went to dinner with friends, and then we ate cake and played board games. It was pretty great.

32. What one thing would have made your year immeasurably more satisfying?
Getting one of the things I’m still waiting for.

33. How would you describe your personal fashion concept in 2011?
I don’t really have one.

34. What kept you sane?
My friends. Writing.

35. Which celebrity/public figure did you fancy the most?
After watching Sherlock, I have a minor crush on Martin Freeman as Watson. But that’s a bit different from liking the actual celebrity, I guess…

36. What political issue stirred you the most?
My congressman is co-sponsoring the Stop Online Piracy Act and both my senators are co-sponsoring the companion bill. I called all of them anyway.

37. Who did you miss?
Lots of people, but especially my sister while she was studying in Australia.

38. Who was the best new person you met?
The 2011 Alpha students were fantastic, as were Julie and Amy, the staff members I hadn’t met before.

39. Tell us a valuable life lesson you earned in 2011:
Life involves a lot of waiting. Maybe next year I’ll learn how to deal with it.

40. Quote a song lyric that sums up your year:
“Balancing on one wounded wing, circling the edge of the neverending.” – The New Pornographers, “Adventures in Solitude“