Today is Kate’s birthday! And I thought that I would share with you one of Vincent’s presents to her.

In my alternate DIE FOR ME universe, Kate wakes up this morning, looks at her phone, and sees a text message telling her to look in her bag. She pulls out a red envelope, and inside is a poem hand-copied in Vincent’s script with the inscription, “Happy birthday Kate, my own cherry tree.”

from EVERY DAY YOU PLAY
(by Pablo Neruda, from “Twenty Love Poems and a song of despair”)

Every day you play with the light of the universe.
Subtle visitor, you arrive in the flower and the water.
You are more than this white head that I hold tightly
as a cluster of fruit, every day, between my hands.

You are like nobody since I love you.
Let me spread you out among yellow garlands.
Who writes your name in letters of smoke among the stars of the south?
Oh let me remember you as you were before you existed.

Now, now too, little one, you bring me honeysuckle,
and even your breasts smell of it.
While the sad wind goes slaughtering butterflies
I love you, and my happiness bites the plum of your mouth.

How you must have suffered getting accustomed to me.
my savage, solitary soul, my name that sends them all running.
So many times we have seen the morning star burn, kissing our eyes,
and over our heads the grey light unwind in turning fans.
My words rained over you, stroking you.
A long time I have loved the sunned mother-of-pearl of your body.
I go so far as to think that you own the universe.
I will bring you happy flowers from the mountains, bluebells,
dark hazels, and rustic baskets of kisses.

I want
to do with you what spring does with the cherry trees.

I began looking for my agent in 2008, after writing my first book, an unpublished memoir called A YEAR IN THE VINES.

My first step was buying the indispensable tome, WRITER’S MARKET. I started with their “Query Letter Clinic”. There’s a pretty specific formula to use when writing query letters, and I worked on my letter for days before coming up with something I felt was presentable.

Now, when I read the first incarnation of that letter, I cringe. The first sentence—the “hook”—was something like, “How do you say ‘up shit creek without a paddle’ in French?” Oh, the shame. Luckily, only one agent got that letter. She never answered, and I don’t blame her one bit.

What was frustrating to me was knowing that, for most agents, the query letter was all they would ever see of my writing. Unless specifically requested, you don’t enclose a sample of the manuscript with your query letter. I thought this was terribly unfair, since I didn’t feel skilled in self-promotion, but rather in writing whimsical descriptions mixed with funny anecdotes.

I learned that you have to be able to do both. Too bad if you don’t think of yourself as an ad-man. You have to get good enough at it to get that foot in the door, or in this case, that manuscript in front of the agent. Just bite the bullet and do it.

After I had my query letter, I flipped back to WRITER’S MARKET’s chapter on literary agents and made a list of the ones who accepted memoirs. I then cross-referenced my short-list with a few Internet sites that gave “grades” to agents and agencies. One site was “Predators and Editors.” I can’t remember the others. But there is a lot of information out there, and you can benefit from the experiences of other writers who have gone through the same process.

I then went to each of my chosen agencies’ websites and read their submission guidelines. You have to find an agent that accepts unsolicited manuscripts. You should find someone who is searching for manuscripts in your field. (Don’t send a memoir if they only work with science fiction. Unless your life has been extremely weird.) And then you should choose one person in the agency that you think is your best bet and tailor your letter to fit them. (Many sites have agent bios or blurbs.)

From my research, I chose my top ten “dream” agents or agencies—the ones I didn’t have a hope in hell of getting—and decided to start with them. Why not start big? I thought.

I had read that agents don’t like you to flood the marketplace with your queries. They want something fresh that hasn’t been shopped around to everyone and her brother. So I limited my first queries, sending them out two at a time. After waiting a week for the first two, I suddenly realized that they might never respond, and I would just be sitting here in the middle of the French countryside twiddling my thumbs. So I sent two more out, waited a week, and then sent another two. I got one rejection back right away. The others took months to respond.

The one agent that I felt the very best about was with Dystel & Goderich. My memoir was about an American mom living abroad, and this agent’s bio said that she had kids and had lived in Spain. Perfect! I thought. Someone who will understand me.

I emailed her my query letter and my five-page prologue, as specified in her agency’s submission guidelines. And an hour and a half later I got a return email asking for the entire manuscript. She said she would read it “promptly.” I had no idea what “promptly” meant to agents, but I gave her the benefit of the doubt, stopped sending out queries, and waited for her response.

Exactly two weeks later, I received an email from Stacey Glick, another agent at Dystel. She said, “[My colleague] shared your memoir with me and I had a chance to read it this weekend. I really enjoyed it and would love to discuss it with you.”

During our phone conversation she told me she loved the book and wanted to represent me. She DID ask how many other people I had sent it to, at which point I was honestly able to say “just a handful.” And the next morning I had a contract sitting in my Inbox.

I realize that this is a dream story. That things aren’t usually this easy and don’t move this fast. A friend who now has three books published wrote over two hundred agents before signing. What I think helped me, though, was:

1. Advice from a few people who had already gone through the process and learned the hard way.
2. Banging away at the query letter (and getting several qualified opinions on it).
3. Being extremely picky with the agents that I approached.
4. Choosing one agent out of each agency to concentrate on and tailoring my query letter for that individual.
5. Reading each agency’s guidelines and following their rules.
6. Making my book start with a bang, knowing that the first few pages might be all that the agent would read.

There are other ways of getting agents, such as conferences and referrals from published authors. (And my agency has a wonderful blog at dglm.blogspot.com with lots of invaluable advice!) But this is how I got my agent, and the result has been more successful than I could ever have imagined.

And if you want to know how I felt when I signed with Stacey, this is the blog post that I wrote that day, back in 2008:

DREAMING OF BOOKS
Last night I had a dream.

In the dream I finished my book and, instead of sending a query letter to a million and one literary agents, I chose just a handful. I heard that the process of finding an agent was like dating, so I looked at each person and agency carefully. And I asked myself if I would be able to sit through a long dinner date with the person, leave the restaurant with a smile on my face, and still be chuckling hours later about things we had said.

Mind you, in my dream I was a bit of a lesbian, because with this particular dating situation, I felt like I only wanted to see women. Who is able to put up with two men in their life, especially if one of them is French?

There was one woman from an agency owned by another woman who I thought would be the perfect date. An hour and a half after I sent her my letter and 5-page prologue I got a return email asking for the entire manuscript. She said she would read it “promptly.” All I could think was “What does ‘promptly’ mean in the agent-dating world? A week? Three months?” I tried to set my mind on “pause”, and refused to give in to my impulse to query other agents until I heard back from her.

And then, in my dream, the agent called me. Well, not her, but another agent from the same agency. I listened as she told me that she loved the book. That it had made her laugh out loud. That she wanted to represent me.

I wanted to know more about her, and she described herself. We had a lot in common. Even more than I had thought I would have with her colleague.

I hung up the phone in a daze, thinking, “This is one hot agent.” Just thinking of what I would wear to our hypothetical dinner date sent me into a tizzy.

This morning I awoke and wondered if I was still dreaming. I blearily opened my email Inbox. And as proof that I was actually awake, and not lingering in the bliss of my literary dream-world, there was an agency contract sitting right there, waiting for me.

Previous post: Road to Publication, Mile 1: From Blogger to Writer

A few of you have asked me to share my road to publication, and since it’s been a long time since I’ve written about that, I thought I’d start at the beginning. Okay, not the VERY beginning, which was a poem about a turkey that I wrote in first grade and was published in my school newsletter. I’ll skip that, and all of the other poems I wrote through high school and stopped writing when I got rejected by my university’s literary journal. At that point I thought, Well, if even THEY won’t take me, I must be crap. So I summarily trashed my dreams of writing and decided to pursue a “real career.”

Fast forward a few years later, and I’m living in France with several long distance relationships: my family and a couple of romances. This was the early ’90s, and email still only existed for the military. I wrote long letters and faxes describing my life in France, and for Boy 1 and Boy 2 had to use all of my storytelling powers to keep them interested from far far away. That in itself was very good training. I found out years later that everyone had kept my letters because they found them so entertaining.

It wasn’t until I moved to the French countryside six years ago that I started writing in earnest. I set up a blog in order to keep in touch with friends and family. But as I wrote stories and posted pictures from my life in France, more and more “strangers” began following my blog until I had a good following of very dedicated readers. Some of them were writers and journalists. And they told me that my writing was good. They thought I should try to publish.

So I collected all of my France stories together and wrote them up into a book—a kind of fictionalized memoir. I called it “A YEAR IN THE VINES.” (Not a terribly original title, but it was meant to convey the content of the book in five short words. I thought I could change it to something more exciting if someone actually bought it.)

That took me about a year to write, grabbing an hour here and there away from my two toddlers and part-time translating and teaching jobs. I remember the evening I finally finished it. I had been writing in the guest-room bed, and when I typed that final period. I jumped up, ran downstairs, and began yelling to my husband, “I did it! I did it! I wrote a book!”

Of course, I had no idea if anyone would ever see it, but we cracked open a bottle of champagne anyway. And I consider that Mile 1 of my Road to Publication. I’ll tell you about Mile 2 (finding an agent) in my next post!

This teaser is to accompany the YA Sisterhood’s Tournament of Heroines, which starts tomorrow (Dec 1). BUT…since the YA Scavenger Hunt also starts tomorrow, I am going to jump the gun and give this to you today. Don’t worry – I’ll remind you tomorrow to go vote for Kate.

What I hoped this teaser would show you is Kate’s humanity. She is just like you and me, but with a few weeks of Gaspard’s fight training under her belt. And she is facing a numa in a dark alleyway. The important part is not her skill, but that she can swallow her fear in order to fight. And…take it away, Kate!

I can’t do this. As the thought flashed through my mind, I had a panic-induced out-of-body experience. I felt like I was up in the air looking down at myself: a teenage girl standing in an alleyway brandishing a sword at a man almost twice her size. I can’t, I thought again. I’m too afraid to move.

My enemy righted himself and started toward me. I looked up into his cold, murderous eyes, and that was all it took. I felt the adrenaline coursing through my veins and my heart thumping in my chest. And suddenly I was in the zone.

LIBRARY ONE

When I was in fourth grade, I brought a book home from our school library. My parents took one look at the back cover and ordered me to take it back: there were witches in it, and as far as they were concerned witches were a banned topic. (Witches being in league with the devil, of course, and the devil being a very real and dangerous presence for my religious family.) The book was Madeleine l’Engle’s A WRINKLE IN TIME. I didn’t read it until I was twenty.

Of course, the witch-book-ban made me extremely curious about a subject I hadn’t previously cared about. I decided to investigate it further. One balmy Alabama Saturday, I rode my bike to the school parking lot and stepped up into the possibility-laden sanctum of the Bookmobile. Surprisingly, its collection was large and varied enough to contain a book on witchcraft.

I returned home and spent the next couple of weeks studying every word of the comprehensive tome, learning about Wicca and the power of nature. There was a little bit about the devil, and I read these sections with the thrill of approaching the forbidden. However, all in all, I was disappointed that there were no spells that could make you fly on a broom or turn someone into a toad. I decided that, with all of the botanical knowledge necessary, herb gathering and the like, witchcraft was too labor-intensive for me. Finally, I dug the book from its hiding place under my mattress and returned it to the Bookmobile.

LIBRARY TWO

Apparently in the 1970s parents didn’t know about sun protection. At least mine didn’t, because for two summers in a row, upon arriving in Destin, Florida, I played the entire day on the beach, got sun poisoning, threw up all night, and then spent the rest of the week in bed with a fever and blistered skin.

Which would have been pretty awful if it hadn’t been for a tiny public library a few blocks away from our beach house. I checked out the maximum number of books, took them back to my room, and escaped the pain of burnt skin against sand-infested sheets (no matter how much you brushed it out, the sand was everywhere) by plunging into someone else’s non-itchy universe. As soon as I finished my allotted stack of books, I was right back amongst the shelves, selecting my next collection of pain medication.

For two summers in a row, the Destin library was a haven for me. It not only fed my mind, but was a balm for my physical suffering, and provided consolation as I watched the other children frolic on the beach.

LIBRARY THREE

Our neighborhood library (the Emmet O’Neal in Birmingham) held a book-reading contest every summer. Cards tallying participants’ points were kept behind the check-out desk, and a poster hung above it announcing the top scoring children’s names. The conscientious librarians made sure that no one cheated by reading books that were below their skill level.

One summer I read through the library’s entire stock of Barbara Cartland romance novels…one a day. My parents must have been too distracted to censor at that point, because I was only eleven or twelve. I read like a girl on a mission. Which is exactly what I was. Because up there on the poster, one position above my name, was that of a boy who somehow out-read me every single year. I’ll call him Damian.

I did everything I could to beat Damian. I even took a correspondence course on speed-reading one year, just to prepare for that summer’s competition. But it did me no good. Damian won every single summer. I hated him for his superior reading speed. I suspected him of cheating. I spent bitter moments wondering if he was bedridden…if he ever went outside…if he was some kind of freak of nature that didn’t even need sleep.

In all of my summers in the book-reading competition, I never beat Damian. But I did read almost every novel in the entire library, even though some were way too difficult for me. I learned to speed-read while lying on my bedroom floor, with the dictionary open next to my book.

So for my good vocabulary and staggering number of books read during my childhood and adolescence, I have Damian and my neighborhood library to thank.

LIBRARY FOUR

To hide the fact that I still loved picture books as a wise and world-weary adolescent, I would occasionally accompany my five-year-old brother to the children’s section of the Homewood Library and read out loud to him. (At a library-respecting whisper-level, of course.)

One day while he was valiantly trying to escape my literary ministrations I was approached by a woman who asked me if I babysat. “I’m twelve,” I responded. “You look much older,” she gasped. I nodded. Already 5’6”, I got that a lot. “Well, I noticed how good you were with your brother. Can I ask your mother if you could babysit for us?”

And that is how I got the job that carried me through my teenage years until I left for university. Babysitting for the Freemans paid for the books I mail-ordered through the Literary Guild. It provided fodder for a short-story that I wrote in college about getting stuck while sliding down their laundry shoot. (Which is what you get when you hire a twelve-year-old to babysit. I managed to climb out before the parents got home.) And it allowed me to meet some of the only people I knew who not only weren’t in our church, but were part of a different belief-system, thus providing me with a fresh worldview.

If it weren’t for the unique climate of a library, one where a frazzled mother could approach a girl she saw reading to her brother, I would never have been offered that chance to broaden my cultural horizon.

THE FUNERAL

I received an email from my U.K. editor Little, Brown yesterday. It was a plea from The Reading Agency, a charity that has a special partnership with public libraries and a simply-stated mission: “to inspire more people to read more”.

British local authorities must make a decision in a few weeks (February 2011) as to what public services to cut in order to save 29% of their budget. Libraries risk being downsized or even closed. People are being asked to urge their authorities to think about the importance of libraries as they decide on the cuts.

The Reading Agency says, “…local authority decision-makers need to be reminded of the important evidence base for libraries’ educational importance. Their work with readers builds people’s literacy levels, educational attainment and employability. It builds confidence, self esteem and well being.” To which I say, “Amen, sister! Preach it!”

For those in the U.K. who feel strongly about libraries, you’re urged to go to http://alangibbons.net and www.voicesforthelibrary.org.uk.
If you’re not in the U.K., please pass this message along to your British library-loving friends.

In the letter Miranda McKearney, the Director of the Reading Agency, asked authors to blog about what libraries mean to them. This post is my response.

Libraries have served many roles in my life, all of them dynamic and positive. The Bookmobile was my search engine. The Destin library was my hospital. The neighborhood library was my college-level vocabulary course. The Homewood Library was my employment office.

Wherever you are, U.K. or elsewhere, I encourage you to think about the role libraries have played in your life. Get involved in your local library. Go there to read a picture book. Or hire a babysitter. And let everyone know how much you value this incredible gift. Free books. For everyone, no matter what age or socio-economic level. It’s an institution to be cherished. And protected.