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 25th, 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.
