Killing it, Garth Brooks Style

I had some great topic to blog about last night. Totally forgot it.

This morning my husband surprised me with a trip to the coffee shop. It's spring break this week at his college, so he gets to work from home all week too. I am often jealous that he gets to leave every morning. This morning, I got to leave. I love my children. I also love being by myself.

The coffee shop owner has chosen to play country music this morning. I'm cool with it. Country is easy to drown out because I don't know any of the words. (If you know me at all, or have read my blog for long, you know that I like to work in silence. Thus the country music mention.)

The feel of country music also reminds me of my childhood in Oklahoma. Specifically, my cousin Sean's wedding-after-party at my grandma's house. That was a biiiiiiiig party with lots of drinking, lots of singing, and lots of Garth Brooks. Less specifically, my mom's brother's family, who did live in the country and whom we visited to for things like Easter.

When Garth Brooks hit it big, he hit it BIG, didn't he? Do you remember the new Garth Brooks days? Do you remember his televised concerts? What was your - or your mom's - favorite Garth song?

But anyway, I'm editing this morning, or will be in a minute, and I'm psyched. Heath sent in 130 pages of a new thriller he's working on tentatively called Bull Trout Late. (I doubt that will stick.) BTL is an actual lake in the middle of the Idaho mountains, and the creepiness that the characters experience in the book he experienced there with his family.

Here's a pic of the lake. 

Of course, Heath's beefing it up quite a bit for the book. The protagonists are a group of teens. I'm trying to figure out what I think about this. They are fairly "character." In fact, I can easily fit a few popular, or ex-popular, teen actors into the roles. Is that bad? I suppose if it's too obvious, then yes. That's bad. Or does that make the actors bad?

Regardless, today is my favorite read-through: the fresh read. Never seen the text before. Don't have to stop to do any edits. Just read. Then go back and kill, kill, kill!

Updates & Rankings

Sick update: Drue is doing better today, but both girls are still in their pajamas and won't be leaving the house. I hate sickness. I do not love being stuck in the house. But so is life.

Weather update: We woke up to a stormy sky, then a quick snowstorm; now it's a bright, sunny day out there. I've learned that "Oklahoma weather" is not so special as we might have thought, for in Delaware we had "Delaware weather," and now in Michigan, oh, do we have "Michigan weather." I think Michigan weather is the most dramatic of all. A snow storm followed by a sunny day...and then probably another snowstorm later today? That's pretty awesome.

Back to work. I'm ready to start sending out letters but waiting on pages. I realized last Friday that the first few pages of TMI just aren't up to par. The editing schedule at Tate was such that I only had the chance to edit a book ONCE. My "second look" at the book was really just me going through and cleaning up my edits plus the author's corrections/edits. I didn't have a chance to actually reread the work.

Disgraceful.

So as I've gone back through TMI, which today, thanks to new metadata, is having a great rank day at Amazon (more on this), I've noticed areas where I would have changed or challenged things had I had the chance to read through the book more than once.

This begs the question: was I ever really a professional editor? Okay, let's not go there, because clearly, to some extent, I was. I just worked at a company that didn't have, shall we say, the best business model.

Back to the point: Friday night, as I was finishing everything up and readying to send queries and pages out early this week, I realized that those first few pages I would be sending needed more work. I was thrust back into grad school and heard professors telling me: the pages need to be alive, PERFECT. But there were places in the text where I stopped reading to think about what could make the text better! Wait...I don't want any agent, ever, to stop reading anything - no, no, no. They must want to keep reading. Therefore...more work.

Amazon update: I sent new metadata out to the book's publisher, and I'm assuming they've updated it on Amazon and B&N, because hello, it is working for us. This morning, TMI is ranked 213,756 in Books. WHOA. Whoa whoa whoa. Yes, please. And thank you.

To work!

Upmarket Fiction

Okay, so maybe I posted too soon. Maybe yesterday's post was naive, or at the very least, the list was too flippant. Writing query letters is tough stuff.

A word I continue to come upon as I search for agents is "upmarket fiction." It sounds so pretentious, but I'll roll with it (there's that "roll v. role" again).

What is upmarket fiction? I am admitting my ignorance here, but this whole blog probably communicates that, so, as a an old friend used to say, whatevs.

Upmarket fiction is basically book club fiction. The top lit agents want fiction they can sell, but they want it to be damn good fiction. Literary fiction is damn good, but it's hard to sell, thus the new "genre." We want books that people will talk about, but we want to be able to fit them into a category, and we can't quite do that with literary fiction, which is damn good but...you get the point.

Lucky for me, my client's books might just fit into this category. At least I can pitch them as fitting in. Why? Because he's a freakin' doctor who writes heady novels. But they're also fit very clearly into the category of suspense. They ARE the kind of books you can sit around and talk about. But they move at a fairly fast pace.

Huzzah! Now if I can just communicate this brilliantly in a query letter.