New writer dealing with the BIG 'Rs' - rejection and requests in the writing world

'A Carpet of Purple Flowers'

What a crazy ride the new writer's journey is...

Am I mad for wanting to tell my story to the world? Wait, don't answer that. :o) 

Oh yeah, my first pair of speck's - EVER! Must be all that editing, lol. No really.

Okay, let's start with the good. It's December 2014, and it's been a year of editing, waiting, editing, etc - nope, it's still not over.

The Positive

I received a request for a partial, and then a full from a New York Literary Agency. The agent had passed my query to the intern and then she sent me this feedback:

Dear Ms. McCartney,

       I read the chapters you sent to me. I really enjoyed them. Can you please send more? I really believe this book has potential with the agency. And if it's possible, I'd love to help represent or help you with it.  I look forward to reading more of your work.

Good Evening, Ms. McCartney,

   *** I just finished reading it (continued from the three chapters you sent to me last Friday). It's beautiful, a work that must be made into book form as soon as possible!!!!! I would strongly urge you to send the ms to *** if you haven't done so yet. Tell *** that I read the complete ms and that I think the agency could represent it without a problem. 
 I hope that he agrees to represent you and your work. Fingers crossed!!! 

Well, of course I was (still am) over the moon (containing my excitement - can you tell?). Once the words sunk in, I sent an email to the agent... I eagerly await his reply. Hopefully, permission to forward the full. My emotions are a whirlwind of nervousness, hope and readiness, for I know that her wonderful opinion, however uplifting, might not be his.
No matter what happens, I'll be forever grateful that she believed in 'A Carpet of Purple Flowers', and I'll cherish the amazing comments, giving the glimmer of hope, a brighter light.

The Negative

I sent my first draft (yes, silly I know) to a UK agent earlier this year (2014). She asked for an exclusive (sounds good, right?), but I had to say no, due to the ms being with another agent (which was a later rejection). Eventually, I received a reply asking me to revise and re-submit. I was confused, for she didn't say what to actually revise. Although, I remained confused, I was eager to please and attempted to improve my ms, blindly. After, another re-submission, I received a formal 'R' - email of rejection . It hurt, I think more so because no reason was given. Didn't I derserve a short paragraph of explanation? - Sadly, no (real world alert).

Dear Tracey-Anne,​

Thank you for giving me the opportunity to consider your recent submission.  Unfortunately, I am unable to offer you representation. Please be assured that I gave your submission a fair and thoughtful review.

Regrettably I am unable to give individual consultation, this is due to the small size of my company and the large number of unsolicited manuscripts I receive on a daily basis.

Since the decision taken in representing work is a subjective one and will vary greatly from person to person, I would encourage you to contact other agencies. 

I wish you the best of luck in finding great success with your work.

You can never tell if your work will appeal enough to grab the attention of an agent, and receiving feedback is rare. I just gotta keep going, and refill the faint crack that appeared after reading the email. This journey has, at times, felt cold and lonely compared to the artist's path that I'm used to (a warm and friendly place). So, again, I search the web for more information of other writers experiences, hoping to find out if I'm on the right track, at least.

Here's what I found:

So, what's the big deal about having agents reading your partial or full manuscript? (It's not like you have a publishing contract).

Queries an agent receives a week an vary from 100 +
(That's whopping 5200 queries/year!!!)

Request for partials/full manuscripts  requested: Approximately 3 partials and I full 

Of those 4, only 1 gets representation. 

The chances of landing an agent:   .0019%  / Agents reject about 99.5% of queries.

One highly respected agent recommends maybe to give up after 100 and go back to the drawing board and revise manuscript or start another one.

LINK HERE

Just to give you an idea, out of all the partials agents/interns read through, only around 10% of these will get a request for a full manuscript. 

If you have received a partial request, pat yourself on the back – your query letter was good! 
If you have received a full manuscript request, do a few fist pumps.

LINK

Full request - first, celebrate. You earned this! Full requests, or really requests of any kind, are hard to come by, so make sure you give yourself the break (and reward) you deserve. 

Asked to resubmit?
That is what writers call a Revise & Resubmit (shorthand: R&R), and it is amazing. Once again, celebrate! Do the Dumbledore dance, because an agent liked your freaking book! 

Keep querying! The fact that an agent even liked your book enough to R&R is a VERY GOOD SIGN. Don’t give up because of subjective rejection. So keep at it, and in the meantime, write something new!  



The Baffled King Composing (blog) HERE

So, you’ve polished your novel. You’ve tackled your query. You’ve researched agents and sent out personalized queries to each of them. You’ve waited. And now the day has come when all this has paid off–an agent is interested in reading your full manuscript. 

First of all stop and take a minute to congratulate yourself. Having managed the slush piles of two different agents, I can tell you that your novel has something special about it if you’ve gotten this far. 

Maybe you wrote a great query. Maybe you added the first three chapters of your novel to your query (depending on the agent’s guidelines of course!) and there was something captivating about it. 

In any case, you did something really right. Because an agent has requested a full manuscript, and that’s an accomplishment.

I feel a little better now, lol :o) 

In truth, I consider myself very lucky getting this far with the 'Gatekeepers', and to have received a few offers of publishing with small publishers, but I'm still holding out. This is when I ask myself if I'm crazy? My answer... 'Let's see what 2015 brings'.  :o)

Meanwhile, I'll sit and scribble/type away on book two, listening to music, hoping that one day soon, my manuscript will transform into a magical (eco friendly) paper book.

Still dreaming and believing.com  :o) 

Love and light

Trace 

xoxo

BOOK WEBSITE IS HERE

Song for 'Dandelion Wind' (novel) - What If You (Lyrics)

Dandelion Wind

Inspiration songs for writing

Love and light,

Trace

xoxo

Let the music take you there ....Omnia - Moon

Visual Inspiration

Visual Inspiration 

LINK TO PICTURE SOURCE

Love and light,

Trace 

xoxo

Dream Series - Episode 1 - THE LAKE

Reminds me of a book character - Bea

Free Novel Writing Course in July 2014

A writer's epiphany - A Carpet of Purple Flowers

Third Person Omniscient 

***

Okay, so today I analysed my writing style. Which was brought on by feedback left by beta readers and a particular editor(a beta reader), Dominique. She mentioned how well I used third person omniscient. So, off I went to research. (Yup, I'm not great on craft terminology, it's something that I'm working on, promise). ;o)

***
I would like to share with you.

  Third Person Omniscient

For example, there are stories where the POV character changes with each scene, but each scene only shows a single POV character. This would mean the story is in Third Person Multiple. But every so often a scene would pop up where there are two POV characters or the narrator telling the reader what the characters in the scene are thinking—and that's when we'd call it Omniscient POV.

The Omniscient POV has many advantages over Third Person Limited. Perhaps the greatest advantage is that Omniscient allows the author to give more information to the reader in a shorter length of time.

In Third Person Limited we'd need to be "shown" what the characters are like, as opposed to Third Person Omniscient, where the narrator can simply "tell" us. Omniscient POV benefits from a larger scope than Limited and allows the author to say more things about the characters' situations than the Limited POV can.

It turns out that most fiction (particularly novels) written in the past century is written in Third Person Limited. Though Omniscient can do more with less, Limited is more common because Omniscient sacrifices what's perhaps the most important thing in fiction: It doesn't allow the reader to get close to and sympathize with the characters and the situations they find themselves in. This is because the distance created by seeing everything from the Omniscient narrator's point of view instead of the character's is too great.

Third Person Omniscient naturally distances the reader from the characters and the situations because there's an "otherworldly" voice telling the story. The voice knows everything that's going on, as well as—in the case of subjective narrators—the fact that they sometimes comment on the events in the story. An Omniscient narrator can even address a reader directly.

The distance between the reader and the characters when a story is written with an Objective narrator is even greater than Subjective. In Objective, the narrator doesn't "judge" the characters for the reader. However, since the reader only sees what the characters say and do and not what they think, it becomes like watching a film.

You can see the characters on screen, you can see who they are and what they're doing, but the screen is always between you and the characters. You can never step into their shoes and see the story from their vantage point, or understand what they're thinking at any given moment.

It isn't impossible to overcome the distance between reader and character when writing in Omniscient. That's most obvious when reading traditional fairy tales, which are usually written from an Omniscient point of view. But readers will most often sympathize with the characters and the situations as concepts, rather than with the characters as people.

In short, getting the reader to sympathize with the characters in the story is part of the art of the Omniscient perspective. Sometimes it can require creative solutions, but don't be discouraged if you run in to trouble. It takes both practice and a strong understanding of the relationship between the narrator, the characters, and the reader.

Pros and Cons

Strengths of using Omniscient POV:

• The narrator has godlike knowledge, allowing the reader to know everything going on at any time.
• It doesn't limit the author to a single POV character in a scene.
• It allows the author to provide information in a more natural way.
• It can provide smoother transition into action.

Weaknesses of using Omniscient POV:

• It's more presentational in nature, resulting in distance from the characters.
• Emotions are harder to convey to the reader.
• It tends to be more "Tell-y" (which can lead to massive info-dumps if you aren't careful).
• The narrator's godlike knowledge means that tension can be dissipated, possibly resulting in a dull-feeling story.

Omniscient POV is not the same thing as head-hopping; those who do it well are masters of the craft and work hard at it. Fiction written in Omniscient Point of View (OPOV) is more along the lines of what we might call Narrative Fiction. It can be any kind of story, but it’s narrated rather than seen/experienced through Deep Point of View (DPOV)—what we now see in most genre fiction. In OPOV, the author is basically narrating the story and can dip into any character’s thoughts at will. OPOV is the style we see most often in classic literature: Jane Austen, Leo Tolstoy, Charles Dickens.

What separates OPOV from head-hopping is the fact that the omniscient narrator maintains a distance from the characters, even though he occasionally will let the reader in on what the character is thinking—but, again, in a style that’s more told than shown.

Authors experienced with using this POV are actually narrating what’s going on inside the character’s head. It isn’t the character’s direct thoughts. Authors who write in a head-hopping style jump from one character’s thoughts to another without any transition between them, sometimes from sentence to sentence, sometimes within the same long sentence.

Omniscient point of view is also referred to as alternating point of view,because the story sometimes alternates between characters. The focal character, protagonist, antagonist, or some other character's thoughts are revealed through the narrator. The reader learns the events of the narrative through the perceptions of the chosen character.

The Harry Potter series is told in third person limited for much of the seven novels, but deviates to omniscient in that it switches the limited view to other characters from time to time, rather than only the protagonist. However, like the A Song of Ice and Fire series and the books by George RR Martin, a switch of viewpoint is done only at chapter boundaries, instead of scene change.

The disadvantage of this mode is that it can create more distance between the audience and the story, and that—when used in conjunction with a sweeping, epic "cast-of-thousands" story—characterization is more limited, which can reduce the reader's identification with or attachment to the characters. A classic example of both the advantages and disadvantages of this mode is J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings.

The main advantage of this mode is that it is eminently suited to telling huge, sweeping, epic stories, and/or complicated stories involving numerous characters.

SOURCE HERE and HERE

The Difference Between Omniscient POV and Head Hopping

***
I completely resonate with this style of writing. Perhaps, due to the way I see my initial story play out as a film in my head - in scenes. When you watch a film, there are different camera viewpoints, adds more depth as visually explaining the information. I write on camera view, the scene/character that I need to tell the story and move plot on. This makes a lot of sense to me, as I am an extremely visual person, the artist in me :o) Explains a lot - out the box.
***
Third Person Omniscient Authors

Phillip Pullman: His Dark Materials
JR Tolkien: Lord of the Rings
CS Lewis: The Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis intrudes as the narrator in his Narnia Series when he writes, "For it is a very silly thing indeed to lock oneself in a wardrobe.” Third person omniscient allows the author to divulge what is happening to several characters even if they are separated by time or location, and also to show their internal thoughts and feelings. It is a popular choice for high fantasy or epic novels, which often have intricate plots and require lots of stories to be interwoven. 
JK Rowling: Harry Potter Series
Jostein Gaarder: Sophie’s World.
Leo Tolstoy: Anna Karenina

***
Below is Dominique's critique (Beta Reader)
Dominique, possesses a four year degree in creative writing, and also has two specialty degrees in 'Writing'. USA

I was crusing along, reading about Bea, then BAM! There's this Karian fella with his friends. There were characters running everywhere. This was a wake-up call for me as a reader and I sat up and started to pay some real attention at this point. With a lot of books, I think this sort of change would have overwhelmed me, but the author's writing is so skilled as to make this change a kind of electric spark that leaps through her writing.
I was very, very amazed at how the author used the third person omniscient viewpoint so naturally. I can honestly say I’ve never read a book where this technique was very effective. Usually I like to stay in one viewpoint, as a reader. But with this novel, I think it gave credit to the grand scope of the story. Bea might be the main character, but the story is about so much more than just her. It’s about Vororbla, something that intertwines all souls together in a way – so I considered it very symbolic to use the omniscient viewpoint.

More 'Critique' can be found HERE
***
Seriously, I am so relieved that I'm not actually doing anything 'wrong', just different :o)
It can be so difficult to see through your own work. To know whether you have what it takes, (I still don't know, but I'm trying). My wonderful beta readers have been such an invaluable aid to my own understanding of how I write, and now, everything is much clearer, thanks to them. It really helps knowing my style. I just started writing for the need to get that story out of my head, with no technical/craft knowledge, because I didn't intend to seek publishing. The story has grown so much, and people actually enjoyed the tale, so I thought, let's see what happens if I put my story 'out there'. It's a work in progress, lol.

Thank you so much for sharing my journey,
love and light
Trace
xoxo

Editing, editing , editing! Update ~ June 2014

Writing a story?

Yup! I've been there. Still going there! Lol

Okay, so it is the fourth draft, and with the help of some amazing beta readers, I'm working on the fifth. 

Lordy, lordy!

It has been quite a journey, and I'm still walking that path, hoping to find my rainbow's end.

(How I long to create art dolls again...one day, one month, well, once the editing is done).

I completed my first draft, 'A Carpet of Purple Flowers' at the end of Dec 2013. 

I left it for a month, and went back to it in January 2014.

Since then, my work has been draft, edit, new draft, edit, etc....You get the picture.

Once I completed the 4th draft, I decided to be brave and ask for the opinions of beta readers.

This felt real scary. Was I ready? I had to be, I had to take that next step in my writing.

A beta reader is usually, an avid reader of the genre that you are writing for. They read a partial, or full, of your work and give you invaluable feedback, what they feel is positive/negative.

This has been a fabulous step for me, because after a while, the page/screen, your story, your 'baby', turns into one big blur. You've worked on it for so long, that it's difficult to see past errors, or how to improve. This is exactly the time, that you need a beta reader, preferably, around eight, for that 80/20 rule. 

Everyone has personal opinions/tastes, so it's important that the writer must remember to only make changes to their manuscript if  more than ~ two out of eight, mention the same thing.

My wonderful beta readers, full and partial evaluations are HERE

I bet you can guess what I'm doing today?

Yes! More editing ~ Whoo-hoo! ;o)

The feedback has been fantastic, much better than I'd ever hoped. However, there are a two areas that need more work...yup, still learning :o) 

The first area that requires editing are the first two chapters, a little less back-story. I wasn't aware of the 'golden rule' of the first five pages. Tut! Tut!

READ HERE

Book Here

The second, adding more chemistry between the characters/groups. 

Could always use more, right?

Well, that was my little update for you. Sorry, arty friends, I'm not quite ready to create physical wonders, but soon, very soon ;o) 

Love and light

Trace

xoxo

The May Moon - Full

Merry May Moon

)O(

 What you are seeking...is seeking you

 Nature's reflection of the moon

 Waiting for the stars and the moon

Full Moon Blessings

Love and light

Trace

xoxox

The Butterfly Bridge Storytelling via visuals

Visual Storytelling

Water contains the magic of nature

Magic is everywhere

Encounters with nature - the self

Suspended in dreamtime

The wind in her hair

Whispers of green

Sparks of life

She is an instrument of the moon

Wonder by starlight

Keep your light bright

Feminine

The stone of heaven's light

Spread your wings and fly

Look for the unhewn stone

She sleeps

Elemental Magic

What do the veils hide?

The old ones

Believe

It's a matter of perspective

Thoughts

Feel 

Imagine

Encapsulated

Water Magic

You're never alone in nature

Twin flame

Mystic blue

She first looked up to see the magic, and then looked within

She understood and knew herself before deciding her path

All sources for images can be found on links below

Tumblr

Pinterest

Love and light

Trace

xoxo