The I Miss You Blogfest...and More!

Welcome to the I Miss You Blogfest,

hosted by

Alex J. Cavanaugh, Matthew MacNish, and Andrew Leon

Here’s the rundown:

The bloggers we really miss…
and the ones we would really miss!

Do you have a couple blogger buddies who aren’t posting as often? Those who’ve pulled back and seem absent from the blogging world? Do you have blogger buddies you are grateful they are still around and would miss if they vanished? Now is your chance to show your appreciation and spotlight them!

On November 16, list one to three bloggers you really miss and one to three bloggers you would miss if they stopped blogging. Then go leave a comment on those blogs.

Our blogger friends are special – time to let them know! 

I only blog on Mondays, my day to post and make the rounds, but there are a couple of blogs I visit every day or every day I know there’ll be a new post.  And while I follow and love so many blogs, and most of them are active, there are a couple of bloggers who don’t post as much as I would like.

First, two I miss because they don’t post as often as they used to:

Jennifer Hillier at The Serial Killer Files – Jenny’s a big time author now with two incredibly popular books, her 2011 debut, Creep, and this year’s follow-up, Freak, plus she’s working on a new novel, so it’s no wonder she doesn’t post as often.  But I really, really miss her, especially since she moved away from Seattle almost a year ago.  Lucky for me, we chat via text, email, Facebook, and phone calls so I never truly lose touch.

Janet Reid’s Query Shark – Yes, I know, Ms. Reid has her own regular blog here, but I really love Query Shark.  I’ve learned so much from that blog.  But she hasn’t posted since September 30^th, and for months before that, her posts were sporadic, at best.  I miss waking up on Sunday mornings and tuning in to read how The Shark has ripped to shreds yet another query written and submitted by someone who’s failed to read all the other queries, as directed.  Better still, I miss those few queries that hit it spot on the very first time, even when they break all the rules—like the query for Josin Mcquein’s Premeditated.  I realize I’m past this query stage, but I still learn a lot from reading them. 

Which brings me to a blog I would miss if it were to ever disappear:  In fact, when this blogger took a short break earlier this year, I found out just how much I did miss it.  And him.  And that blogger is…

Matthew MacNish at The QQQE or The Quintessentially Questionable Query Experiment – Much like Janet Reid, Matt has serious skills when it comes to dissecting and analyzing queries and determining what works and what doesn’t then suggesting ways in which to fix it.  So if you have a query you are thinking of submitting to agents, send it to Matt first.  The man knows what he’s talking about.  And his commenters help a lot, too.

And finally, the one blog I never, and I mean NEVER, EVER miss, is your friend and mine…

Alex J. Cavanaugh - There are very few bloggers out there who are as consistently and truly inspiring, relentlessly selfless, and remarkably entertaining as Alex.  He is the highlight of my Monday, Wednesday, and Friday mornings.  In fact, I typically read his posts before I even get out of bed in the morning.  So if Alex’s blog were to ever cease to exist, I would be crushed.  He is a lesson to us all on how to be humble and pay it forward.  And what's more, I've met most of my Blogger friends through Alex, so he's kind of a matchmaker of sorts.  Many thanks and cheers to you, Alex!

With less than 3 weeks until the December 6^th launch of Lisa Regan’s debut novel, I’d like to share with you her book trailer for Finding Claire Fletcher.  So without further ado…

    

Stories Don't Happen in a Vacuum

            I knew I would have to come up with something to post about today, but when I woke up, I still hadn’t thought of anything new, that is until I read today’s post at BookEnds Lit Agency.  Today is Workshop Wednesday at BookEnds, the day agent Jessica Faust posts one of the queries she’s received for critiquing, kind of like Janet Reid does at Query Shark.

I love query critiques.  I think it is the single most effective way to know what does and doesn’t work in a query.  Now, I don’t always agree with Ms. Faust’s opinion.  Case in point, a few weeks ago, she critiqued this query and loved it.  I thought the query was vague, at best, and had many of the qualities that agents advise writers not to include.  But she loved the “southern rhythm” of the voice.  Yeah, I didn’t get that at all and I lived in the south for awhile, but whatever, just like books, it’s subjective and if she liked it then kudos to the author.  Well done!

But this week’s critique struck a nerve with me because Ms. Faust alluded to something I hear over and over again when agents are critiquing queries.  After reading the first two paragraphs of the query, she more or less said, this is all backstory; the real story starts here.  In other words, cut all this crap out and get to the meat of the story.  While I agree the query needs a lot of work, I find issue with the fact that the agent automatically thinks the first two-thirds of the query, and therefore the book, is all backstory. 

In my opinion, this is the story, at least part of it.  It is how the author wrote it to give it structure and body, a reference point from which to contrast the conflict.  It bothers me that the agent thinks that everything that came before what she considers the core of the story is somehow irrelevant or that the story goes off track.  Yes, the author should have written the query differently to show the progression of the story and the importance of that progression. 

She implied subtly that the story might be about something else, or perhaps that was just the agent inferring that idea, but even still, that doesn’t mean all those points the writer thought important enough to include in her query are not crucial to the story.  Some of the commenters, in fact, seemed very interested in the writer’s story, calling out the fact that those first two paragraphs were simply acts one and two.

My point is that agents toss aside stories based on assumptions that the reader doesn’t want to know all that happened before, that they simply want to get to the meat of the story.  Well, okay, I don’t need to know everything that happened to the nineteen-year-old MC during her first seventeen or eighteen years unless it’s relevant to the story, but from age nineteen on, all the things that happen to her forge her into the woman she becomes and adds dimension to her reasoning, to how she handles the conflict.  Stories don’t happen in a vacuum.  We need to care about the protagonist and their journey and we do this through knowing and understanding their history. 

I often wonder why everyone is always in such a hurry to get to the end.  It’s all about instant gratification so we can move on to the next thing.  Why not savor the time spent with a story and let yourself get immersed in the simmering heat of the layers as they buildup?  I’m not saying that everything that the query writer put in her query is essential.  Personally, it comes off more like historical romance, not historical fiction, and so definitely not my thing, but I get that those details are important to understanding why there even is a conflict. 

Could you imagine if Winston Groom had to query Forrest Gump in today’s market?  Some agents would likely say to cut all that backstory about Forrest as a small child or in high school, but it is those details in the early chapters that show how Forrest changes later in life, how he manages to deal with all the drama that’s thrown his way.  How can we know if we weren’t privy to the backstory?

All this relates to me personally because last week I rewrote my query, for what must be the fifteenth time, based on advice from Stephanie DeVita in her post last week titled Slow Summer, where she says, “In most of the queries that I read, the writer isn’t giving me the most thrilling aspect of their book, the crucial element that should make me desperate to ask for more pages. In other cases, it’s unclear if that pivotal element is even there.” 

So I cut all the “backstory” out of my query and just alluded to it in the second line, then got right into the major point of the conflict.  But now I worry that any agent who requests pages will think the first third of my novel is all backstory when, in fact, it is the story, or part of it anyway.  Since the story is all about a man who changes, who becomes a different man due to some pretty terrible things that happen to him, that first third of the book is the setup.  It determines what he was like at first and how those events twisted him into a different man, made him act a certain way and do that one awful thing that drives the story.  The rest of the book is how he deals with the repercussions of those decisions.  Why would any reader care about how he changed and what he did if they didn’t know his “backstory?”

And by the way, I hate that word, backstory.  It makes it feel like all those early words are somehow illegitimate, a bastard to be cast aside.  Yes, it matters how that information is presented, that we feel it is part of the actual story and not simply dumped there in a lazy attempt to give context, but I like to think of it as the ice cream in my sundae.  It’s all those yummy bits on top that make it special, but you can’t just eat the yummy bits.  You have to savor it properly with the ice cream set below.  Otherwise, it’s not a sundae.