THIS IS WHY WE DO IT! by Janice M. Wilson

I am often asked how I do it or how I get my inspiration (easy – nature!), but once in a while someone will ask WHY do I do it?  Usually followed by a question of have I been published (yes) and how much money I make (not much – yet!) but it seems unfathomable to many that I can sit for hours and just………..well, write.   Usually for no monetary reward.

Well, the idea!

I guess many consider it a chore, or they don’t think they have it in them. Do they mean to finish something or write an epic bestseller?  Probably both, because both require commitment, talent and luck.  Or maybe they simply don’t like to nor have the time to write.

But I ask them who wrote all those books in libraries and bookstores?  They read them, or at least see the latest movie made from the latest bestseller novel.  Yes, those books. Someone else can make the time to sit and write them. I can too.

Who writes?

Ordinary people like you and me, and out of those – the diligent who didn’t give up get published!

About WHAT?

There really are only 7 main topics of life to write about:

1.     man against man

2.     man against nature

3.     man against himself

4.     man against God

5.     man against society

6.     man caught in the middle

7.     man and woman

It’s all been said before.   So why bother?

Because we continue to live it all.  Over and over again – all of them. And as long as man continues to live them, the questions of overcoming them are pondered, experienced, and reflected. With success or failure, the cycle never stops.

Hence – we write.

We write to vent.

We write to share.

We write to understand.

We write to create.

We write to educate.

We write to escape.

We write to capture time.

We write to feel/be felt.

As long as we live and breath in love, fear, joy, sorrow, faith, pain and hope – we all speak through our souls about life somehow.  Some of us do it in affection, gifts, touch, words.

And some bare their souls through ink.

It’s what we do.

Preparing to Pitch at a Writing Workshop

Six long years it has taken to write this book. This novel. This Fantasy. This Southern Literary Speculative Fantasy.

I’m going with Southern Fantasy for now.

On February 20^th, I (finally, finally, FINALLY!) get to pitch Blessed Are the Peace Makers at the Atlanta Writing Workshop, where I am confirmed with two agents and wait-listed for another.

Scattering Seeds aka Pitching Literary Agents

All three agents represent the Fantasy genre and all three sound awesome. Is one of them looking for me and for Peace Makers? Will one of them love William and Awen’s story as much as I?

In order to find out, it’s important I be prepared when the pitch-date rolls around. To this end, I searched our Relentless Writers Blog for helpful tips, then googled to find more on pitching at a conference.

These are the articles that helped the most:

The rules to follow before/when querying a manuscript, by Literary Agent, Mary C. Moore, including:

"Rule #6: Have your manuscript finished, edited, and polished before querying.
Reason: Although a lot of agents will do edits before shopping your manuscript, their time is limited. They are not going to be willing to do extensive edits on a project, so if you send out a manuscript before it is finished, you are essentially setting yourself up for rejection."

From Author, Chuck Sambuchino’s Tips for Pitching a Literary Agent at a Writers’ Conference:

I learned not to bring manuscript pages, to keep my pitch under 90 seconds (fiction) and that it’s okay to bring notes, but not to read from them (oh, and to be brilliant when sitting next to an agent at lunch, but not to pitch them there.)

From How to Pitch to an Agent at a Writers’ Conference, by Author, Kerrie Flanagan:

“Writers need to understand that agents attend conferences with the same high hopes that writers do. Writers want to find an agent who will represent them, and agents want to find clients who have a book they can get excited about. The agent/author relationship is that of a partnership where each party has the same goal in mind; to sell the book to a publishing house. 

Jon Sternfeld, with the Irene Goodman Agency said, ‘I wish writers would see the agents more as an equal—when there's too much desperation in the writer's eyes, agents tend to de-value them. If a writer is confident, I know that they don't need me so much as we need each other.’”

Am I there yet? Am I ready to pitch? Not quite. There are things I have left to do in the next two weeks:

 1)      Complete the last pass (3^rd Draft) of Blessed Are the Peace Makers;

2)      Hone my query letter and memorize it for my pitch;

3)      Write (and memorize) a few more one-line blurbs for chance-meetings of other agents (and interested writers) during the day-long workshop;

4)      Practice, practice, practice my pitch and one-liners;

5)      Do deeper research on the three agents I will be pitching – so far I’ve only found the standard bio on each of them (maybe because they are newer agents);

6)      Plan my outfit so that I look professional and feel great;

7)      Resolve to reap the other benefits of attending the workshop, whether I receive an agent request or not, courtesy of Author, Merissa McCain.

There you have it. Good luck on YOUR next pitch.

~ Olivia J. Herrell aka O.J. Barré

P.S. Or just skip the pitch altogether and go Agent, Janet Reid's route: Pitch Sessions Are the Spawn of Satan. Wish I'd read this before spending so much time and money. 

Structural Racism in Romance: Call it out

This is a post about change.

The other day I came across an essay by Courtney Milan, where she laid out her views on a controversial post from the Kirkus Reviews blog. The original Kirkus post (here) celebrated diversity across romance subgenres, with statements from Kwana Jackson and Damon Suede, but it also included the following quote:

As a reviewer, I have very little time to actually read books that I don’t get assigned... 

I rarely get romances to review that are written by or include characters of color. So even when I actually buy a book, or a publisher sends me an author I really want to read, I usually don’t have time—reading that book takes me away from titles I get paid to read. 


You don't even have to read between the lines to see that Kirkus, an organization with substantial clout in the world of publishing, doesn't send diverse books to it's reviewers. As Courtney Milan states, "This is an example of structural racism. Everyone may mean well, but if a publisher knows that a debut author isn't going to get a Kirkus review, that publisher is less likely to buy that author - even if they care about diverse books, they also have to care about the bottom line."

The Kirkus reviewer, Bobbi Dumas, responded to Courtney Milan with a thoughtful post, inviting further conversation, a discussion I hope continues. In contrast, I found the formal statement from Kirkus to be somewhat disingenuous. They said, in part, "The editors of Kirkus are always thinking about diversity - all kinds of diversity - when we make our assignments." 

Nice of them to take that position, but it's contradicted by their editor's statements in the original post. They do say they will be working to improve diversity in their reviews, and I look forward to seeing what they come up with. 

Now, why would I use a video from the 1976 Olympics to begin a discussion of an ongoing controversy in the romance world? Because I hope to make a (potentially clunky) comparison.  

The video is a twelve minute history lesson, primarily because of the conversation between the two broadcasters, Donna de Varona and Curt Gowdy. Here's some background, for those of you who weren't around to watch the '76 Olympics in real time. The East German team, particularly their women, won an astonishing number of medals. Prior to the 4 x 100 relay, their women's swim team had won the gold medal in every event, and they were heavily favored to win the relay.

Here's a snippet of the pre-race conversation between Mr. Gowdy and Ms. de Varona...

CG: "I want to ask you about these amazing East German women. What's been your impression watching them, as a former Olympic swimmer?"

DdV: "Well, I think our main problem, which I've stated before, is that our women are developed in the club system. The men that developed that system are only coaching men on the collegiate level. Young boys have good high school programs and good collegiate programs. Women are just starting to get involved with that. We don't have the coaches available to us, and there's a big gap and we have a long way to go, contrary to East Germany, where the women are brought in equally with the men..."

I absolutely applaud the deftness with which she changes the focus of his question from the East Germans, widely suspected of using performance-enhancing drugs, suspicions which were later confirmed, to the issues being faced by the US women's swim team. Ms. de Varona goes on to say that the only reason US swimmer Shirley Babashoff was able to compete in the '76 Olympics was because Title IX provided her the means to train with her college men's team.

Here's some more backstory for you. The first time she competed in the Olympics, Donna de Varona was 13 years old. The year was 1960, and she was the world record holder in the 400 IM. Four years later, she won two gold medals at the Tokyo Olympics.

And after that? She retired from swimming, because there was no place for her to train. There were no college programs for women swimmers. 

Instead of swimming, she studied broadcasting, another area with few opportunities for women. She was seventeen the first time she appeared on ABCs Wide World of Sports, the youngest broadcaster and one of the only women on the network. She carved out a career in television, and served on the President's Council on Physical Fitness and Sports.

I'm going into these details because I didn't know much about Ms. de Varona, and she has had an amazing life. While she was still in her twenties, she worked with the Senate on a number of measures, and was a consultant on the legislation that included "Title IX of the Equal Education Amendments Act which prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex in any educational institution receiving Federal funding."   (Wikipedia)

Title IX. The 1972 law that said if you were going to spend money on men's sports, you had to spend the same amount on women's sports. Forty years after the law's passage, women's athletics looks a lot different, and not just because of digital photography.  Here's a link to the 4x100m relay final from the 2012 Olympics in London so you can see what I mean.

So what does an ongoing debate among authors and publishers of romance have to do with the problems faced by women athletes in 1976? A big part of my message, I think is that the '76 video gives me hope, because it shows that change is possible. The downstream effects of a single piece of legislation have made a difference in the life of every woman in this country. 

The discouraging part comes from the difficulty in legislating the marketplace. I mean, we've got laws against discrimination, but we still create sub-subgenres for romance novels written by and about all types of people. Labels like m/m romance, African-American romance, interracial romance, and transgender romance create barriers, making books sound like something your average romance reader wouldn't be interested in. But these stories are all built around the same basic template and they pull from the same tropes. They're all romances.

They're more alike than they are different, though a hard-wired, systemic bias makes those similarities difficult to see.

The only way to cure that kind of bias is to call it out when you see it. The discussion engendered by a few blog posts has prompted Kirkus to promise "immediate steps", and maybe they actually will create policies that enable diverse authors to have their work reviewed. If they do, it'd be a smaller-scale Title IX, and their action would have significant potential impact. 

The alternative is to carry on the status quo, though I have to believe that pioneers like Donna de Varona hold us to a higher standard than that.