Trans/plant/portation

Finding an agent, so I keep reading, is like falling in love. If query letters to agents are like little love missives, the idea is that the agent will be spellbound, struck with wanting for more from the would-be author, desperate for that partial manuscript or book proposal. When their love connection is made, they can ride off into the sunset of the publication industry. Wait a minute. Something’s not right here.

I think this is a strange model for a business proposition. Of course I would want anyone interested in representing me to like my work. It couldn’t happen any other way. But there’s something about the rhetoric around finding representation that turns my stomach.

Maybe it’s that I’m really bad at dating. High school was a bizarre experience, with my school enforcing the “only guys ask girls out” code and me of the girl set who only got asked to make out behind the bleachers so nobody would know we’d “dated.” College didn’t make life any easier—half the guys I thought were interesting and attractive turned out to be gay. This apparently, by the way, is a common straight woman’s complaint. They make whole movies and books out of this stuff.

• There was the date in which I arrived on time and he was late by an hour, the time during which I got to have an interrogation, excuse me, a chat, with his mother.
• There was the guy who really did break out a calculator to see how much tip he should pay the waiter. Boy, you need to learn to do math in your head if you’re going to be a cheapskate.
• There was the one who asked me to build him a bed frame because he’d “always wanted to watch a butch do carpentry in my living room.” And yes, I built the frame.

So forgive me if I’m not a little trepidatious about doing anything on a “dating” model.

I sent out my first, second, and third round of query letters, starting way back last August. I figured it would be like entering a contest; I’d send out my hopeful scouts into the literary world and I would just sit on my hands and wait for the responses to come back. Do de do, I hummed, I’m sure they’ll just reply in no time. . . .

Plink! I got an email! With burning fingers I pounded the mouse button to open it. Someone had fallen in love with me! Me!

Thank you so much for your query. While your project certainly has merit, I’m just not the right agent for this material.  I wish you the very best in your search for representation.

Warm regards.

Oh. Oh, okay. Well, so that wasn’t the response I was looking for, but she said it had merit. But what did that mean, just not the right agent? I remembered some article or other that I’d read about how writers over-parse the responses from agents. Don’t over-parse, don’t over-parse. That was like being told to think about anything except little green monkeys.

Two days later, I got another response:

Thanks for your query. I’m afraid, however, that I don’t think I’m the best agent for your work.

I wish you the best of luck in your publishing endeavors.

Afraid? That was strange. But okay, I got the point. Nobody was falling in love with my query letter. I went back to the drawing board, tried not to think about wallflowers at high school dances, and rewrote it. And I changed the title of my memoir.

Batch after batch of query letters came back with mostly nice but regretfully not in love responses. I did still more research online, akin but not akin to figuring out how to meet Mr. Right or the Next Hot Momma. I tried to improve my query some more, changing it from 3rd person to my own point of view. Condense, shorten, personalize each query with the name of a book I’d read that said agent had worked on. Thank goodness I’m an avid reader.

I discovered agent blogs. Now, not every agent has a blog, but a lot of them do, so instead of continuing to shoot arrows into the dark I’d stick with agents who revealed something about themselves online, and I’d try not feel like a stalker while doing it.

I had become something of a fisherman with an elaborate bait box. Heeeeere, agent agent agent, try my juicy strip of squid! You’ll like it! You’ll fall in love.

At some point my insanity level decreased, to the delight and relief of my friends and family. I went back to writing and took a break from querying, and in the process, wrote and revised three short stories—two in the speculative fiction/sci fi genre, and one straight literary. One story made the rounds of sci fi journals, rejected every time, with a bit more terseness than I’d received from my memoir query letters, but with enough positive feedback that I’ll probably try it at a few more at some point.

I’d learned, it seemed, to be patient. Or at least more patient. At a few points an agent would write back asking for a full manuscript, or my book proposal. So I learned to write a book proposal. I would become excited with possibility, only to be disappointed when they’d write back again saying they just weren’t the right agent for me. Now I understood that this phrase was code.

One agent only took submissions through a Web form, and I was aghast that I was only allowed to fit 400 characters into the submission. Four hundred characters? My first paragraph of this post is more than that. I snipped, no, I chopped out whole sections of my query. My beautiful words, falling to the floor, and the final result resembled nothing of my careful prose. I pressed send, figuring I’d never hear from her again.

In the meantime, I submitted my memoir to my regional writer’s association literary contest, and registered for their annual conference in July. I knew I just needed to meet other writers, talk to some agents informally, see what I could do to make myself more appealing. I had heard a lot about having an online presence, and I already—as an unemployed person in the middle of nowhere—had an active Twitter account, Facebook account, and this blog. I started dreaming up things I could write about, like local restaurant owners in Walla Walla, that could get me more visitors to my Web site. In the spring I hooked up with a couple of writers I’ve known online for years who were starting a blog on pop culture. And social commentary via pop culture analysis started humming out of my keyboard on a near-daily basis. I really was working on an audience, even though at the time I just was excited to have some fun writing this stuff and reading others’ work.

And then I got a one-line response from the agent with the very limiting submission form: Please send me the first three chapters of your memoir.

Ho-hum, I thought, now the pessimist. I’m sure she’ll write back in three weeks and tell me she doesn’t feel the love. But okay, here are the first three chapters. Have at it, Ms. Agent.

She wrote back again. She really likes it! What? Please send my book proposal. I took a brief look at it, punched it up a little and updated it (because I really never stop revising something once I’ve written it, and if that’s wrong, well, I kind of can’t help myself) and sent it on. I was reservedly hopeful.

A few days later I heard back from her again. This time she had questions for me. Questions! That’s kind of exciting—it felt like I was sending text messages to Orion and back. The twinkling heavens have questions for me. How could I not answer the twinkling heavens?

I received word from the literary association that my memoir was a finalist in the literary contest. I passed this happy news onto the agent. She thanked me for sending it, and she had some things she wanted me to change to my book proposal. It was the first specific feedback or insight I’d gotten from an agent in this whole process, and I was thrilled to receive it. Even if she later decided not to represent me, I at least had this great experience and knew that I wasn’t just a crazy person with word processing software.

In the middle of last month, she asked for my full manuscript. I went to Kinko’s while on vacation in DC and mailed it out to her. I haven’t heard back from her yet, but I feel like I’ll hear something, and I’m happy she’s going to this same conference in a couple of weeks.

I still get uncomfortable with the romance model of finding an agent, but at least I understand now why people are using it.

I like fireworks as much as the next person, assuming the person next to me likes fireworks as an annual, but not more frequent, source of half-hour entertainment. But I made the trek into the steamy Michigan night thinking that my niece and nephews would really really very much yes want to see the light show. I learned something new in the process:

• The 13-year-old girl was more interested in recording the entire half-hour event onto her camera, having almost no interest in watching the explosions with her naked eyeballs.
• The 10-year-old boy remarked, “eh, you’ve seen one set of fireworks, you’ve seen ’em all.”
• The 3-year-old was thrilled beyond belief.

So why do we drag out our blankets and children and slap mosquitos off ourselves, pushing through slow-moving traffic to find that last parking spot, half a mile walk away? An extreme need for patriotism?

I plopped down on the ground, cuddling Susanne a little and watching the toddler fight for all the patience he had in him, waiting for the brightness to light up the indigo sky. We found a spot that framed the fireworks by two very large poplar trees, the kind that drove my mother crazy with all of their pollen, and that I played under as a child, because my sandbox caught its enormous shade and was viewable from the kitchen window. I can’t remember a single organized fireworks show that I saw as a kid. Instead we’d light our own fireworks on the sands of Myrtle Beach where we stayed for a couple of weeks most summers. These were procured from our friendly tractor trailer container, parked in the lot of the local Piggly Wiggly, suggesting that The South was a far more dangerous place than New Jersey, where we lived, because such things were illegal there.

Mom was the risk-taker, almost eager to light the blasting caps like she were ready to mine for something under the sand. I have to say she’s an agile one; nobody moved away from the lit fuse faster than she, and on the challenging beach, no less. I have a hard time getting my feet under me just walking, when it comes to sand.

It got so that I liked hearing the booms from the explosions against the sound of the surf from the Atlantic. So last Sunday I didn’t hear that combination, but I’ve learned to be flexible and take things as they come. Hearing kids giggle gleefully while their parents oohed and aahed at the unexpected shapes appearing in the sky was enjoyable enough. But I think in a few years, I’ll have to go back to the beach for Independence Day.

And ask Susanne to handle the fireworks. We all know I’d blow off at least a couple of fingers. I’m a scared Yankee with that stuff.

Weddings, I’ve discovered over the years, are as varied as anything—wildflowers, thumbprints, coffee stains. In my life, I’ve been to many, many weddings, including:

• An actual shotgun wedding in which the bride’s father really had a rifle nearby
• A last-minute wedding of two friends whose parents had discerned were about to elope
• A wedding for a friend who had very recently converted to Jehovah’s Witness—still my personal record holder for longest sermon ever
• A Minnesota wedding in which a few of the guests showed up in sweatpants
• A wedding in which my siblings and I got so rip-roaring drunk the maitre’d asked if he could cut us off
• A lesbian wedding held at the infamous Salahi’s Oasis vineyard in Virginia—yes, those Salahis

Then of course there’s my wedding, and we all know what happened there. In case we don’t know, it was a splendid, oppressively hot day and in the middle of the reception, I blew out my left ACL. Apparently, this is a common event, so don’t mock me too badly.

We received word that our friends were going to get married this summer and immediately, reflexively, my mind ran through all of my prior nuptials experiences, culminating, unsurprisingly, with the Why I No Longer Dance to Billie Jean moment. I was ready to move on, as I’m sure everyone else who knows me is, too.

These good friends fall solidly in the “hippie” category of person. What kind of wedding would we see?

We heard from the bride-to-be, who is, among other things, an interpretive dancer, that there would be interpretive dancing. I remarked that their wedding may be the gayest ever we’d seen, even gayer than the gay ones. But the dancing turned out to be lovely. Choreographed by the bride, it highlighted what we were about to experience from the ceremony itself, which also had an original song written by the bride’s father, burning sage and a pagan-lite blessing, a communal turning to the four corners, and a linked touching thing or other, in which we all put a hand on the person next to us, all the way to and including the couple. This would have been a sweeter activity were it not for the 97-degree daylight beating down on us and making the majority of our skin sweaty and damp. The bride and groom accepted our love and support even if it came with some measure of perspiration. We were touched by the sentiment, nonetheless.

The ceremony took only about 40 minutes, meaning that it failed to beat the time of the longest ceremony I’ve experienced, which went for more than 2 hours. People would have died of heat stroke if we’d had to sit out there that long. We made our way to a cocktail hour, sipped at some cool beer, and then seated ourselves for dinner, which was a tasty barbeque buffet. This meant that Susanne ate three pulled pork sandwiches in two days. Suffice it to say she won’t go anywhere near a pig product for a while.

One guest ran up to us, half-drunk, asking if we could locate any empty tin cans so she could attach them to the couple’s car. I looked over and saw that there were already six balloons taped to the windows. I smiled and made a note not to let intoxicated people decorate my car.

After the sun set it wasn’t long until Susanne noticed a bright light at the top of the Blue Ridge Mountains. How obnoxious, she exclaimed. Then we realized it was the moonrise. Score 2,000 points for this wedding, the first I’ve attended with its own moonfreakingrise. Our friends stood outside, watching it and feeling whatever overwhelming emotion they must have noticed at that moment.

Their friends who are in a zydeco band struck up a set and people danced and drank, danced and drank, until the guests, en masse, were snockered. There came a point at which my own level of sobriety became incompatible with theirs—I could see that they were having fun, but we were on different planes of existence. We hugged our friends and wished them well. They were getting ready to settle in for a few days at a resort in Mexico. We were headed back to our B&B and a nice bath with water jets. Same difference, I’m sure.