FOR SALE: Stained Glass Wings of Shine - OR - Meditations on Throwing Yourself Against the Cold and Steely Husk of the Publishing Industry

Writing a book is difficult. It’s difficult the way that say sawing your left and right arm off and then re-attaching your right arm to your left nub and your right nub to your left arm is difficult – it’s like this very barbaric process of taking yourself apart and then reassembling the pieces, except that they don’t quite go back the way you thought they would. You spend a long time trying to be polite to the people that ask about the scars.
                It also apparently makes you melodramatic.

                Okay, so maybe writing a book isn’t all that bad, but trying to sell it to an agent certainly is. It’s like the above process, only you for some reason decided to film this process and are now trying to get complete strangers to watch the video, explaining, in a sentence or two, the significance behind the fact that you used your pinky toes to thread the needle.

                Apparently this process too reinforces melodramatic tendencies.

                All hyperbole aside, I came to an interesting realization today – it’s been just over one year since I last attempted to hawk my book. The very first query letter I sent was on July 13, 2011, and read as follows:

Dear Ms. B____,

I should warn you—my experience with disability, until last year, was limited to my own, and those of my family: namely drinking, drugging, and the emotional schizophrenia that accompanies both (you know, the whole-package deal). This was before I spent a week with Joe, a severely autistic boy, attached to my wrist; before I suddenly found myself responsible for his well-being; before I went to Camp and wrote this book.

My commercial/literary novel is titled Someone Worth knowing, and when asked about it, I usually say something along these lines: “It’s the story of an ill-tempered, alcoholic ginger (Good Bobby Good) who finds himself at a New Jersey summer camp for children with autism, brain damage, and Down’s syndrome, and how he manages to survive the week.”

And then, because I like to talk, I’ll go on: it’s about the relationship between disability and inability—the spotty boundary that exists between, say, a young man with autism so sever he requires full-time care, and a slightly-less-young man feeding an alcoholism so rampant that, left to his own devices, he will surely destroy himself. It’s a coming of age novel, in a sense, and at no point does it spare any of the humor, sadness, and insanity that constitute the camp experience.

I like to think of this novel’s style falling in the same vein as Jack Kerouac’s work (but, you know, actually good), while my readers insist that the manuscript is more along the lines of Jonathan Ames, Dave Eggers, and J.D. Salinger.

Whatever it is, it will leave you laughing, brokenhearted, and perhaps slightly sunburnt.

Thank you for your time and consideration,

etc. etc.

To give away the ending (spoiler alert!), the book was not picked up. Skimming through several pages of my email, it looks like I tried sending more-or-less this same letter to almost 40 agencies, and though I heard back from a few… well, I did just give away the ending. To provide some context, I wrote this particular letter after reading an article on an agent that picked up a book after receiving a quirky but endearing cover letter, and I thought it was a neat way to try and “sell” my book. I did most of my book editing/submitting last summer while traveling through Yosemite, California and Madrid, Spain, which is to say that I spent a lot of time with my laptop amidst overweight and perspiring tourists as well as a family of like deeply confounded Spaniards. My letters on the whole felt fired from the hip, not to mention ripe with a sort of manic slavering for publication.

No wonder it didn’t go over
                So I let it go. I worked this past year, forgot about writing for what time I could, and started picking the books and pen back up when I couldn’t stay away from ‘em any longer. And of course, I came back to this book, which has since re-donned its original title: Stained Glass Wings of Shine. In going through the book, I see it’s not quite the style I’m writing in today, but it’s not the piece of garbage I pessimistically wrote it off as this winter, either. It’s actually pretty good.

                So yesterday, July 25^th, I sent my first query letter for 2012. It reads as follows:

To D____ S______,

I'm writing on behalf of my novel, Stained Glass Wings of Shine. The book features one Good Bobby Good, who's something of an unhinged alcoholic short in stature but tall in heart. G.B.G. finds himself detoxing & en route to a camp for kids with disabilities (autism, down syndrome, brain damage, etc.), where he meets Mikey G., a 6'5" mostly-non-verbal eighteen year old kid with autism and an inexplicable penchant for diapers. Through the course of the story, Bobby copes with the shakes, learns to care for another human being, and even goes so far as to confront and conquer what lies at the root of his past several years of self-destructive behavior (well, kind of - maybe). Stained Glass Wings of Shine is a smart, quick read, and is rich in both detail and heart - it would be an honor to share my story with you.

As for myself, I'm a 25 year-old Seattleite…

Etc. etc.

To be honest, I expected to find my older letters to be more manic, to seem completely off-the-handle crazy – I think I hoped that writing these new ones would be a breeze in comparison. Looking at the two of them here now, well, they’re not all that different. I’m trying to be more direct, more honest – I’m worried less about selling the damn thing and just trying to show it as it is. Who knows, maybe this time around, someone will ask for pages and fall in love. Because that’s how they describe it in all those agent-interview articles, you know – they say that the right agent reads your book and falls in love and can’t help but to represent it.
                Sounds a bit sappy to me.

                But in any case, I believe in this book. And if I can believe in it and share that belief, well hell – maybe a complete stranger will too.