Jackie Barbosa

I have to say, one of the hardest things for me about having many friends who are also writers is that there are writers who I dearly love on a personal level, but whose books, for whatever reason, just don’t work for me. I actually live in a kind of perpetual dread of the release of my dearest writer friends’ books, because I want to love them, but sometimes, I don’t, and then I feel stuck. Can I tell you, my dear friend, that I didn’t like your book and STILL be your friend? Should I lie and say I loved it? Hedge? Or just say nothing at all?

Now, I have to say that if one of my friends (writer or not) told me she didn’t care for one (or even all) of my books, I would not hate her. I would not cut her off and refuse to speak to her ever again. I would still consider her a friend and be happy that she felt she could be honest with me, because I value honesty above empty flattery. And I actually believe, in my heart of hearts, that most of my writer friends feel the same way.

Still, it’s tricky, and one of the reasons I don’t review books and rarely ever really enthuse about a book online. I will do it in certain cases (Jeannie Lin’s Butterfly Swords is a recent example of a book I’m raving about, but although I’ve met Jeannie and consider her a friends, I didn’t know her before I heard about the book, so I feel a little more sanguine going ape over it), but by and large, I don’t talk a lot about the books I’ve read–whether I liked them or not–because I don’t want anyone to feel criticized by omission.

It’s a sort of crazy world I live in, then. Am I a lunatic? Too worried about the fragile feelings of others? Or just being prudent?¹ I honestly can’t decide.

Tweet This Post

In honor of all authors who’ve recently experienced a series of rejections, whether from agents or editors, I offer the following somewhat tongue-in-cheek (and somewhat NOT) overview of the process of moving on.

The Seven Stages of Grief

1. SHOCK & DENIAL

   You read the rejection letter for the third time. Then a fourth. And it really IS a rejection, not an offer disguised as one. You double-check the envelope. Maybe it was meant for Mrs. Hinklemeyer, who lives next door. Granted, it’s unlikely she also wrote a romance novel titled LOVE IN THE TIME OF DYSENTERY, but then, they do say there’s no such thing as an original idea. But no, the envelope is definitely addressed to you. But still, there must be some mistake. This just can’t be right.

2. PAIN & GUILT

   After the shock wears off, you feel like crap. Plus, you get five paper cuts from reading and rereading that damn rejection letter. You start the second guess yourself. Maybe you shouldn’t have killed your hero off on page 5 of the manuscript (but hey, you did resurrect him on page 15!). Maybe you shouldn’t have used the word “turgid” quite so many times. And trying to write a historical paranormal comedic thriller horror mystery romance might not have been the best idea, but damn it, it seemed like the right thing to do at the time!

3. ANGER & BARGAINING

   What do these publishing professionals know anyway? They wouldn’t know a good book if someone hit them upside the head with it. They’re all a bunch of risk-averse weenies who wouldn’t buy the Bible if God submitted it for publication. But hey, what if you sent chocolates with your submission? Or maybe if you promise you’ll give up chocolate…

4. “DEPRESSION”, REFLECTION, LONELINESS

   Aw hell, they’re right. Your book sucks used tea bags. You’re a complete loser who couldn’t even write the phone book. You lose all hope and motivation. Writing is a waste of time, effort, and emotion. You feel like a whiny crybaby and refuse to log into any of the social networking sites or your email for fear someone will ask you how you are. Or worse, announce they’ve just sold in a ten-book deal for seven figures.

5. THE UPWARD TURN

   Just when you think you’ll never write again, you get a glimmer of an idea. Something so good, you can’t NOT write it.

6. RECONSTRUCTION & WORKING THROUGH

   You slowly put the pieces back together. You start writing because you have to. With some help from your friends and critique partners, you realize that there are a lot of reasons your previous manuscript was rejected, and none of them are that it was actually bad. Plus, the only way to be sure you’ll never sell a book is to quit. And that’s just not an option.

7. ACCEPTANCE & HOPE

   You put your much-rejected manuscript in the Magical Mulch Pile* under the bed. The publishing world just isn’t ready for it yet. But wait until they get a load of your new project, a historical paranormal comedic thriller horror mystery young adult romance. Working title: LOVE IN THE TIME OF ACNE. Yeah, this time, you’ve got it nailed!

Tweet This Post

I’ve often said I don’t make New Year’s Resolutions because I figure if there’s anything I should stop or start doing, I should start doing it/not doing it when I think of it instead of waiting until January 1st. Something’s either virtuous and a good idea or it’s not, right?

That said, goals are not the same as resolutions. Goals are the targets you set for yourself and you don’t expect to wake up on January 1 and have them all accomplished. And I do think goals are useful, as long as they fall within the Erica Ridley guidelines for goal-setting, which are as follows:

* Goals should be specific
* Goals should be quantifiable
* Goals should be realistic
* Goals should be attainable
* You should be accountable

Erica gave a great explanation of all five guidelines on the Manuscript Mavens back in January of 2007, which you can still read here. (By the way, have I mentioned recently that Erica’s awesome paranormal gothic Regency, Too Wicked to Kiss, will be released by Kensington Books in their Zebra line in just two months’ time? If you haven’t already, hop over to her website for the book. It’s chock full of fun stuff and extras.)

So, now that we are a full week into the new year, here are Jackie’s specific, quantifiable, realistic, and achievable (cough) goals for 2010:

1. Write or revise every workday, even if I don’t feel like it and even if only dreck comes out.
2. FINISH at least two projects with word counts over 40,000 and two under 40,000. (In 2009, I was real good at starting, but very bad at finishing. Aside from one novella and two very short stories, I didn’t actually write THE END on anything.)
3. Submit at least three proposals/completed manuscripts to major publishing houses.
4. Submit at least two short stories/novellas to major epublishers.
5. Read a minimum of one book per week (I have really been falling down on this one and I know it’s not helping my writing).

That’s it. Pretty simple, really. I could have been a lot more specific about the individual projects I’m planning to work on, but decided that probably wasn’t a good idea since a sale of any one project could derail my plans to work on others (especially since they’re mostly unrelated to each other and/or targeted to completely different genres/publishers).

Check in with me again in about 358 days to find out how I did !

Tweet This Post

Today marks the second day of November, which means it is day number two of that much-heralded event, NaNoWriMo (short for National Novel Writing Month). If you’ve never heard of NaNo, I suspect you of having lived in a cave for the past 3-5 years or of not being in any way connected to the writer community. Because NaNo haunts the consciousness of writers everywhere, even those of us who don’t “play.”

Just in case you haven’t heard of NaNoWriMo, let me explain the “rules” in brief. The idea is to start a fresh WIP on November 1 and to write 50,000 words by November 30th. If you write those 50,000 words, you’re a NaNo “winner.” If you don’t, well, I wouldn’t say you’re a loser, but you don’t get to call yourself a winner, either.

I know a lot of writers who swear by NaNo. It pushes them to set aside everything else and just pound on that WIP for a month. It forces them to turn off the nasty internal editor and write like the wind. And a fair number of folks have had amazing success with books they wrote for NaNo. Carrie Ryan, author of the much-celebrated YA novel, The Forest of Hands and Teeth, wrote that manuscript for NaNo in either 2006 or 2007. She “won” NaNo, then won a very nice contract with Delacorte Press and a movie deal (after, I have no doubt, my revising of the initial manuscript).

But for some of us, NaNo just doesn’t work. I’m one of those someones. I’ve tried a couple of times, but I’ve never managed to stick to it for more than a week or so. There are lots of reasons for that, not the least of which is that I am, by nature, a slow, plodding writer. A 25,000 word month is cooking for me! But there are other factors as well.

First of all, what lunatic decided November, of all months, should be the one we use to pound out 50k? Did they forget Thanksgiving in the US is in November, not to mention Black Friday? (I never, ever shop on Black Friday, but that doesn’t mean I forget its importance.) In addition to the three days to a week kids usually get off from school for Thanksgiving, there’s also the Veteran’s Day holiday, and (in my school district) the dreaded weeklong early dismissal for parent-teacher conferences. Seriously, even if I thought I had a prayer of generating 50k in a month, it would never be in November (just as it would never be in the summer months, during the Christmas holidays, or spring break). Also, as an aside, why not choose a month with 31 days rather than a measly 30?

For me, I think the perfect NaNo month, were I to choose one, would be May. It has 31 days, only one brief holiday (the three-day weekend for Memorial Day), and the kids are in school full-time. The weather’s nice, but not so nice you can’t bear to be indoors.

But even then, I doubt I’d really ever be able to commit to NaNo to the point of being a winner. In the final analysis, it’s just not set up for the way I write. And while I have nothing but respect and encouragement for those who do NaNo, and I hope they’re all winners. Meanwhile, I’ll keep plodding away on my WIP at my 1k-per-weekday-if-I’m-lucky pace and watch you all fly by me.

Tweet This Post

I’m a little less than three thousand words into a new project, and already I’m angsting about its direction. Now, I’m always a trifle neurotic about whatever I’m writing, but usually the actual worrying about whether I’m “doing it right” waits a little longer than one chapter to settle in. The “OMG, what if this sucks?” anxiety normally sets in at around 10-15k.

I know why this is happening, though. It’s because this book ventures into territory I haven’t explored before–not just in writing, but in reading as well. I think I can say that the story revolves around vampires without revealing too much about the premise, so with that much in mind, I will admit my deep, dark secret: I don’t read vampires.

Oh, I’ve read some of the vampire classics, including the book I really think of as the definitive modern take on vampire life, Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire, and, of course, all of Emma Petersen’s vampire romances (because she’s my best bud, critique partner, and awesome too boot), but in general, I’ve never been that interested in the vampire genre. I’ve never read either Stephanie Meyers or Charlaine Harris nor have I seen the movies/TV series based on their books. What’s more, I don’t intend on starting now.

I just heard your gasp of horror. But Jackie, if you’re going to write a vampire book, shouldn’t you read a lot of vampire books so you know the genre?

Well, yes, there’s something to be said for that approach. In general, I write the genres I like to read. I cut my romance-reading teeth on historicals and, therefore, when I started writing them, it was natural for me to write historicals. It’s what I’m familiar with and what I love as a reader, so of course, it’s where I went.

So, why not apply the same strategy to my foray into the vampire world? Mainly because, as much as I fear that my interpretation of the vampire genre will be either too dark or not dark enough, I worry even more about having my vision influenced by other writers and therefore “diluted” in some way. I don’t want the what I hope is my vampires’ uniqueness leached out by getting commingled with too many other people’s take on them.

Which is why I’m taking the scary step of writing what I don’t know. Yes, it’s risky and a little panic-inducing, but on the whole, I think it’s the right way to approach this project.

What do you think?

Tweet This Post

So, I’m sitting here this morning listening to my iPod and just really getting a kick out of my music. (Partly, this is because the darn thing wasn’t working for months. I thought I was going to have to take it to the Apple store to get it fixed, but my 12yo son figured out how to reset it manually, bless his heart. I must say his efforts on my behalf validate my decision to continue to feed, clothe, and house him.)

Because I have the iPod set on shuffle–and I have almost 600 songs loaded on it–I have no idea what’s coming next (except that it can’t be anything I’ve already heard). To start this morning, I got Thriller by Michael Jackson, then True Love Travels on a Gravel Road by Nick Lowe followed by A Day in the Life by the Beatles, Fame by David Bowie, and now, Shoebox by Barenaked Ladies. I’d never have CHOSEN to listen to those five songs in particular if I’d been scrolling through my music, but they’re all awesome songs.

My husband, though, hates it and complains vigorously when he has to listen to my iPod in shuffle. Some of that is that we don’t completely share musical tastes, but mainly, he hates NOT knowing what’s coming next and that it might be thematically/musically out of sync with whatever he just heard. When he plays his iPod, he always chooses either artists or albums and plays them straight through. He talks a good game about creating playlists, but I’ve never actually known him to do it except for specific circumstances (i.e., a Cub Scout meeting/event).

Anyway, it occurred to me that this difference in our iPod listening habits pretty well describes the primary difference between our personalities. I’m incredibly unstructured in my approach to life–one of the hardest things about having kids for me was the whole notion of having a schedule…or even a routine. I like spontaneity and unpredictability–to the point that some might consider me flighty or flaky (or both!).

My husband, by contrast, likes everything just so. If anything comes along and pushes him off his well-thought-out path, he gets cranky. Predictability and routine is the name of the game for him, which probably explains why we’ve managed to stay married for almost 20 years. A guy who likes variety and spontaneity a whole lot is probably not the best bet for husband material, after all .

All in all, I think it’s a good thing that I married someone who is my polar opposite in this regard. He keeps me from flying off in fifty directions at once (keeping me to a solid 20 or so at a time, lol). And I keep him from being way too rigid and plodding. It’s a good match!

Anyway, this got me wondering about you all. What kind of iPod listener are you? And what, if anything, do you think your iPod listening habits say about you?

 Loading ...

Tweet This Post

I think it’s safe to say that one of the most common conflicts for heroes (and to a lesser extent, heroines) in romance is a fear of commitment. This fear usually extends from an incident in the character’s backstory wherein said character loved and lost in a big way. Having been hurt by one woman (or man), the character has lost all faith in the opposite sex and must overcome this internal conflict to reach a wonderful HEA with the person he/she was truly meant to love all along.

Recently, I’ve seen a few reviewers and commentators say they’re pretty sick and tired of this trope, and just what the hell kind of weenie has ONE bad experience and extrapolates from it a lifelong mistrust of ALL members of the opposite sex. I kind of agreed…until it hit me today (as the result of the insightful comments of my dear Amie Stuart) that I’m having exactly this kind of commitment phobia. It’s just that it’s about falling in love with a story, not a person.

Ever since the book my agent and I shopped over the summer failed to garner any offers, I’ve been flitting from story idea to story idea like a Regency rake from one eligible young lady to another. Each one seems more attractive than the last, but there’s always the possibility that “Story Right” (SR) is hiding just around the corner.

The thing is, I’ve had an absolute surfeit of really great story concepts in the past few months. I’ve written a dozen or more blurbs for various ideas and a few pages here and there of this or that, but then a new idea comes along and knocks the latest SR off its pedestal. I have a brief fling with new SR, and then, voila, that one is also shoved aside by the next Bright New Shiny.

I’ve always been prone to this. Until I finished my first single title (the one gathering dust under my bed) back in late 2007, I think I’d only ever managed to complete one other story of more than a few thousand words in length in my life, and I wrote a lot. I just rarely found stories that so engaged my imagination that I couldn’t easily be distracted from completing them when a “better” idea came along. So this is nothing new…

But it is backsliding. For a while there, I finished a lot of stories. None of them single title, I grant you, but still–I maintained enough interest in them to get to The End. Now, I’m finding myself barely able to get to 10k before I start to have doubts and look for something else to work on.

Amie suggested to me earlier today when I sprang my latest and greatest Really Cool Idea^(TM) that maybe the reason I’m coming up with all these great ideas is to avoid actually writing anything. And I realized, damn her, she’s right! It’s purely subconscious, of course–or it was until she pointed it out to me, drat it–but my mind is shying away from committing to any one book because I am afraid of getting hurt again. I don’t want to pour my time, energy, and yes, love, into another story only to have it rejected. It’s easier to avoid love altogether than to risk getting hurt.

All of which circles back around to my original point. Do I believe that ONE bad experience can lead to a longterm inability to trust in love? Absolutely. In fact, I’d say it’s the oldest plot in the book .

Tweet This Post

Based on the results of my (entirely unscientific) poll, you all like personal insights into the author’s life. Today’s insight into mine is the results of today’s trip to the hairstylist. (Note: These aren’t professional photos at all. The first one was taken by my husband while we were on vacation, and the two after photos were taken by my 10yo daughter about twenty minutes ago.)

Before

After

So, what do you think? I’ll tell you one thing, in the heat of August, I prefer the hair off my neck !

Tweet This Post

While I’m waiting to hear back on the proposal my agent has out on an exclusive right now, I’m noodling on other ideas in case it doesn’t go (which realistically, it may not because it’s a pretty quirky book).

In addition to my middle grade book (which I’m writing when I find the time, although that hasn’t been often lately), I’ve been thinking about several other stories:

• An action/adventure/superhero-y YA  for which I have a main character, title, blurb, and hints of the plot, but nothing “writable” yet.
• A contemporary with a suspense element; again, characters, title, blurb and hints of plot, but probably not yet writable.
• A dark, angsty historical for which I have a lot that’s arguably writable (characters, plot, conflict) but for which I don’t have a title. And I hate trying to write a book without knowing what the title is!

I know it’s an odd hang-up, but it’s one I can’t shake. I pretty much always tackle writing a manuscript in this order: Title, Hook, Book. Of course, that’s not to say the title always comes to me before the hook (or blurb), but usually writing the blurb/thinking about the story will suggest the title very quickly. And many times, I get the story idea from the title (the contemp I’m thinking about started as a title and the story suggested itself from the title).

Anyway, before I can take my historical idea any further, I really need to settle on a working title, even if it doesn’t stick (although my hope is that it does stick at least until the point at which I send it to my agent and she sells it–then the publisher can toss it out the window, lol).

So, here are the three titles I’m considering. None of them strike me as 100% “right”–each seems to me to have its problems–but I’d love your impressions of the possibilities. Unfortunately, though, I can’t seem to get the “Insert Poll” option to work and place the poll inside of this post, so you’ll have to vote on the possibilities in the sidebar. (Sorry about that–there seems to be a scripting error somewhere, and I have no idea how to fix it!)

Thanks for stopping by and thanks in advance for voting. And if I get really motivated, I might even get up a WTF Wednesday post for today.

Tweet This Post

I’m off early Monday morning for a five-day visit with my aunt and uncle in Minnesota. It’s become something of an annual tradition since we went the first time back in 2007, and my kids were pretty disappointed when we told them we might not be able to fit it in this summer. As luck would have it, though, we found a few days to squeeze it in and a bunch of frequent flyer miles to pay for the tickets.

I don’t expect to have the computer with me, which means I’ll be away from email, Twitter, and the blog for the whole time. Hopefully, you’ll all still remember me when I get back .

In the meantime, here are some photos from our trip to Yosemite earlier this month (the camera was out of battery by the time I got there, so there aren’t any of little ole me–I consider that a plus) to entertain you. Hey, they’re pretty!

Hiking up to Vernal Falls

Vernon and Aurora at the top of Vernal Falls

Half Dome

Julian on a rock at Mist Lake

All three kids on the Merced River

Everyone but me at Tenaya Lake

Tuolome Meadows

Aurora, who turns 10 today!

Vernon does his Iron Man impression

Snow in July!

Hanging by the campfire

Hope you enjoy the photos and I’ll see you in a week or so! 

Tweet This Post