Blueberry Cake and Failure (which precedes success)

My now-4yo daughter had a birthday this weekend and requested a blueberry cake. Part of me went "ew." There's family folklore around here about the Christmas morning that I labored to create homemade blueberry muffins using a dubious recipe and came up with mounds of bready, fruit-studded, gag-inducing sand that not only the kids hated but that our chickens would not eat.

So, the request of the blueberry cake caught me off guard.

Have you ever noticed that modern blueberries just aren't quite as good as the candy blueberries that come in little powdery purple clumps in Jiffy Muffin Mixes? I love those candy blueberries. My husband, whose mind gravitates toward all things agricultural and genetically altered, complains that modern blueberries have been so bred for size that the sweetness has gone out of them and their texture is (his words) "nasty."

I still like them fine in a McDonald's Fruit & Yogurt Parfait, as I've mentioned before.

Anyhow, it became a challenge, and at the advice of my baking-queen sister-in-law Julie, I bought two(more expensive because it contains a can of REAL wild blueberries) Betty Crocker blueberry muffin mixes and baked them in 9" rounds and then drizzled them with a lemon glaze made out of 1/2 cup lemon juice and 2/3 cup sugar and some water, cooked on the stove until the sugar dissolved. I used a chopstick to poke dozens of holes in the cake for the lemony sweetness to seep down through both layers.

Can I just say? I think I redeemed myself on the blueberry front.

This isn't my cake but it's the internet image that matches it best. I did two layers...Mmm. I love this cake plate.

Right now I'm getting details together to run a new round of queries on my novel. The topic is out there, I'm aware. It's not something most of us will have read a dozen times in the past. I'm hoping some brilliant agent will see it for the cash cow it is and snap it up.

And like the gaggy blueberry muffins that preceded the triumphant blueberry cake, here's believing the non-triumphant queries I've launched will be followed by a bidding war among publishers for some lucky agent out there!

Genres and Queries and Yogurt, oh my!

I've got two projects ready to query for agents, and it has made me think about the importance of knowing what genre your book is.

There's a tendency among writers to want to write what we want to write, regardless of the readership. And that's great. It's totally fine.

However, if a writer does have the goal of getting published it's important to have the end-product in mind. For publishers, writing is a commodity, and it needs to be marketable. The very first thing a publisher needs to know to evaluate whether the book will work for them is the GENRE.

What is a genre? It's a type. It basically dictates who the audience of the book will be. Here are some examples of fiction genres, with my general assessment of the audience they target:

Picture Books (books with pictures, aimed at kids)
Chapter Books (longer books for young readers)
Middle Grade Fiction (that means for grade schoolers, the protagonist should be age 11)
Young Adult, a.k.a. YA (teen readers, the protagonists should be age 15-16, very little wiggle room there)
Literary Fiction (novels where the internal conflict of the main characters takes center stage)
Commercial Fiction (novels where external conflict for the main characters is most prevalent)
Mystery (self-explanatory)
Thrillers (like Baldacci)
Suspense (like Hitchcock)
Paranormal (ghosts, etc.)
Dystopian (where the world as we know it is broken, like Fahrenheit 451)
Fantasy (where the world-building is a main part of the story, often a quest or epic battle)
Science Fiction (where futuristic technology plays a major role)
Magical Realism (regular world with a dash of magic)
SteamPunk (not quite sure, but often set in the past with current technology involved; is it like Cowboys and Aliens?)
Historical (set in the past, usually educating the reader about the time period)
Romance (where the end isn't a surprise, but the joy is in the journey of girl getting boy)

There are others, and there are sub-genres of these classes as well; for instance, within Mystery, there is a sub-genre called "Cozy Mystery" where the blood isn't too gory, and you can imagine reading this curled up next to a fire with a cup of tea on a rainy day. There are also "Hard Boiled Detective" mysteries, like the Sam Spade stories of Dashiell Hammett. Or you've got "Procedurals" where the emphasis is on the medical evidence. Doesn't Patricia Cornwall write those? They're a little gritty for me and my cotton candy reading taste.

There are also gradations of Romance. Everything from "Sweet," to "Christian," to "Hot," to "NASCAR." The genres of Romance seem almost limitless. And it's a big market.

Okay, now. This morning I sent my first query to an agent. In my letter I noted the genre of my book. In order to even know which agent to query, I needed to know what genre she agented, and what her interests are. It really narrows things down. It's an important step in getting published.

Yeah, I can see how it feels constricting to some of us who would like to think of ourselves as "genre-bending" writers, but the problem with that is that when a reader picks up a book, he or she has a certain expectation and desire to be entertained in a certain way. For instance, some nights I stand in front of the Red Box thinking, "Do I want a comedy or an action movie?" There's an expectation, and it's part of the contract between the reader and the writer, as William Noble said. The deal is, the reader says, "Tell me a story," and the writer does.

Now, onto more important topics. Sometimes I stand in front of the Red Box and realize it's across the street from McDonalds and all I can think is how much I am craving a Fruit and Yogurt Parfait. I love that crunchy granola they put in the packet to keep it crispy and slide the spoon through the little plastic wrapper to keep them together and ready for me to combine and eat. Sometimes the chunks of strawberries are still frozen. I know, I know, some people are haters about The Golden Arches, but don't dis the Yogurt. That stuff is gooood.

Check out the Deliciousness

Querying Querying

It's time to dust off the old query-writing hat. It's been a while since I donned it. About a decade. And times have changed. Query expectations have changed. Heck, even submission systems have changed. Email queries are the norm for a lot of agencies now? Cool. And bad at the same time. How easy is it for an agency screener to hit the delete key?

So, I have gone over mine a zillion times. It's starting to come together. It has a bit of the flavor of the tone I use in my novel; the voice of the query seems to be a mirror of the book. There's a hint of the conflict, a hook at the beginning, a bit about the character's growth.

Today I ran across this great post by Natalie Whipple. She has a fantastic writing blog. Highly recommend. Here's a link to her post called, "Don't Knock the Query."

She's right. I find myself hating the query. Why can't the agent or the publisher just take the time to read my whole novel and make a judgment? Come on! We writers went to all the trouble to pen these tomes--doesn't the world owe it to us to at least read the things?

Ha. Well, ha. Isn't that a bit egotistical? I regularly put down books that don't catch my interest with a back cover blurb or a good first page. I'm not a last page peeker (I know some people are, and I guess that's your right, even though it's kind of wrong, unwrapping the presents on Christmas Eve and then rewrapping them and acting surprised on Christmas morning.) A lot of books simply don't appeal.

So, in a way, it's kind of merciful that agents only ask for a query initially. How much forestry would be wasted (and I do mean wasted, as agencies just don't recycle. Sorry. That's what I'm told. Not that I'm a big recycler myself. Guilty! Guilty as charged!) if we all just printed out every single word of our 90,000 word novels and sent them off in piddly little mail trucks to the upper West Side of Manhattan? Gasoline alone...think of it. $3.35 a gallon around here this morning, baby.

It preserves resources and time to simply send the query. Either just a single page and a SASE goes, or else a blip of electricity, into their inboxes. I think we can trust these people to know if the concept appeals to them or not after a few minutes, as much as we trust ourselves to know whether a novel in the library or bookstore will *not* be our cup of tea at first glance.

So, with that, I'm going to keep honing the query, make it match the story as well as possible and so it will give my super duper chosen agent a chance to decide based on what's really there. That's the goal, folks. Not to write the best query every, in particular, but the best query for your book. It's gotta match.

Speaking of things needing to match, there's got to be a matching candy somewhere. Probably my favorite way to have a matching candy would be to have two of the same candy. Or three. Just a good candy in multiples.

However, one matchy-matchy treat stands out: the Twin Pop. Sweet, cool, fruity (unless you get a root beer flavored pop) and oh-so-refreshing. I have about 15 of them in my freezers right now. The red kind, which I assume is cherry, isn't quite as good as the blue. Who knows what flavor blue is. Does it really matter? Some days -- days when I don't care if I have what looks like a purple tattoo around the inner level of my lips -- grape is the only flavor that satisfies.

Luckily I live in a warm climate, and be it mid-February or not, a twin pop is almost always in order. One caveat: banana. Not a fave. Luckily, it is the favorite of two of my children, so no pops live in vain! Long live the twin pop! Ooh, once I saw a "How it's Made" episode that showed the life cycle of the Twin Pop. Very interesting. I bet you could youtube that if you really wanted to know. I need to get back to my query, or I'd dig around and post a link for y'all.

Happy querying and popping!

Querying Querying Now We Go -- Er, no.

So, it's the new year. A lot of us are getting all excited about writing again, now that the rush of the holidays is over, and we're thinking about what we really want to accomplish. It's a great time to dust off our writing desks and get back to work.

HOWEVER, it is not the best time to start sending out queries!

Put those queries on the shelf, ladies and gentlemen.

In the excitement of resolutions, LOTS of people have this same idea. In fact, from what Anne Mini says, and what Kirk Shaw says, this first three weeks of January is the busiest time of year for agencies, with more queries coming slamming into their inboxes than any other time of year.

If I want to stand out in a crowd, I like to be in a smaller crowd (especially being as short as I am.)

Anne Mini had other advice on when to time queries, like, not on a Monday, as the inboxes are full to the brim with them, and not on Fridays or weekends, when agency people want to clean out the box and get out the door.  The best time is mid-week, she says.  So time it that way for "less competition."

Instead of making a goal for a January appearance on the agent's desk, go for a February 1 goal, or a March 1 goal, or thereabouts.  It's just doing yourself a favor.

Now, I'm not really in the know about all of this, and I don't mind admitting that. However, I think this makes sense and I believe it.  So, when I finish this novel I'm plunking away at (which I truly believe will be sooooon), I'm going to try to time my query to my best advantage!

Wait. Maybe I shouldn't have shared this info after all.

Speaking of things not to be shared, I'm one of those moms who doesn't share the best candy with the kids. One time I made a special dessert (her favorite) and took it to my friend who was going through hard times and when I showed up she let her kids pounce on it like locusts. Very generous of her, but am I like that? No. I am not. If there is food I love and feel like would be pearls before swine, the kids can just forget it. My husband too. (Although he doesn't give a rip about candy, poor guy. How much he misses!) The good stuff is mine.

My favorite things to hoard are the following:

Strawberry Twizzlers. See's Chocolates.