Book Contests

Last week, I saw a Tweet promoting the Brighthorse Books Prizes with a submission deadline of Sunday (yesterday). I was particularly interested in this contest for a few reasons:

1. The deadline worked out.
2. The small press is young.
3. The press has three contests: one for poetry, one for short fiction, and one for novels. 

1. The deadline. As mentioned in my last post, I had failed to meet the earlier summer deadline I'd set for myself with this revision. That happens to me often. Summer after summer, I set large writing goals and wind up falling behind my schedule. But having this new goal worked to motivate me. I completed the revision on Friday, went back through for a final proofread, and submitted my manuscript to the contest Sunday afternoon

2. A young press. I imagine fewer people submit to a contest that is not well known with a long history. A famous press with a long-established contest surely gets hundreds or even thousands of entries each year. But with a press only in its second year, some writers will not have heard or it or will be hesitant. Of course, there is good reason to be hesitant. You don't want to fall for a scam and throw away money on entry fees or to think you're getting your book published by a reputable place only to discover it's a vanity press. From what I can tell from some very limited research, this place seems above board. So while it is small and young, I still feel like I would be happy having my book published with them. Bottom line: better odds with fewer submissions.

3. Multiple contests. Finally, the three separate contests also may increase my odds of winning. Many such contests have a a prize for short stories but not for novels. Or they have a single fiction prize for any book-length works of fiction, including combinations of short stories, novellas, and novels. When those categories are divided up, there are likely fewer submissions in each one.

Also, my impression is that there are fewer contests for novels than for short stories. I think this may be because novels are still seen as the realm of big presses. Short story collections are tough to sell, so small presses have taken up the charge of helping to get those out into the world. Novels can still fight for themselves. But what about smaller, literary novels? Those that won't find a home at a big New York publishing house? Those still need the world of small presses. Certainly there are many small presses publishing those novels, but this type of contest is a great entry into the small press world and from what I've seen, such novel contests are still rarer than short story contests.

I feel good about having submitted my novel. I have no idea what the odds are of winning. What I do know, however, is that people do win such contests. I have friends in my age group who have won contests like this before. It really is a great way to get a book out into the world when it would be hard to find a match with a publisher through the slush pile or when the literary size and scope of the book would likely not be big enough to attract an agent. I still assume the odds are against me. Even if this contest has fewer submissions than some of the big ones, that may mean that they get a hundred submissions instead of a thousand, which would mean only one percent win.

But whatever happens next with this particular contest, I feel good about my book as it currently stands. And the next time I read about a contest or a small press looking for submissions, I'm ready to submit.

Deadlines and Goals

I'm a teacher at a university. I get paid (modestly) year round, but my actual job only requires me to be present in a classroom about eight months out of the year. I have so much "time off" that it seems like a perfect job for a writer. Right?

Of course it's not quite so simple. I don't really have four glorious months with nothing to do each year, but I still have significant time off when I can afford not to teach summer school. I often have a big project in mind, like writing a draft of a complete book or revising an entire book. Typically, August arrives, and I haven't done close to what I set out to do in May.

This summer, I knew I was going to have a tight schedule. I got married in June and then went on my honeymoon. I knew most of that month would be useless to get writing done, but I still set some large goals for myself. I wanted to return to the novel I wrote as my MFA thesis and do a final revision / polish and submit it to some contests and small presses. In particular, Autumn House Press has an annual contest with a June 30th deadline. So I thought, maybe I can take the end of May into June before the wedding craziness begins, and bang out a revision to submit.

I knew that goal was optimistic, but I thought it would motivate me. That's the thing with goals. It's easy to say, "I want to accomplish _____." But it's much harder to do it if there's no pressure to get it done. If I have the whole summer, I work a little here and a little there, and then it's August again, and I have to work on my fall syllabi. But if I say, "I want to accomplish _____ by June 30th, and after that, it's too late," I stand a better chance.

Surprise, surprise! I failed. The wedding stress took more out of me than I expected (though it was worth it!). Then came the honeymoon. And jet lag. I managed to revise half my novel by the end of June, which still felt good. Then July rolled around. I wasn't teaching, but I took a summer class for fun, and other factors of life occupied my time. By early August, I still had about a quarter of the book to revise. The problem was, it didn't feel urgent. The same doubts from when I worked on this book years ago resurfaced again and again: Why bother? Where am I going to send it if I finish this revision? Who will want to publish this? Am I wasting my time on something nobody else will ever read?

Then I found a new book contest from a small press. The deadline is Sunday. With less than a week to revise several more chapters, that goal is a tough one. But it's doable. So I'm back in gear. By Monday, I really need to focus on finishing prepping for fall classes, but for the next few days, I can focus on this book. And I think I'll have it ready by midnight on Sunday.

I wish I were the type of person who could more easily set a personal deadline and just stick to it. But it's nice to realize that there are so many presses and contests and journals out there, that I will be able to find external deadlines to keep me motivated.

Writing Sample II

I sent off my fellowship application for the Wisconsin fellowship today. It's amazing how long it takes to put together a packet like that. I wanted to make sure my writing sample was as strong as possible, obviously, so I spent many hours over the past couple of weeks working on it. I got some feedback from trusted early readers to help me decide which sample to use. I was leaning toward the current beginning of my novel, which I feel is some of the strongest writing I've ever done, but I knew that I was way too close to it to evaluate it properly, so a couple of other people looked it over and, sure enough, agreed with me that the new beginning to the novel is in good shape. I got that feedback several days ago, but I still wanted to go over the material a couple more times. Plus, I wanted to include the second chapter as well, which still needed a bit of tweaking.

So I continued editing and polishing the sample. Yesterday I typed changes into the second chapter off of a marked up hard copy and then read over the entire thing today. Just this week I lectured my classes on the importance of polishing their work before turning it in, doing that final read through (preferably aloud and preferably off a hard copy instead of just on the computer) before declaring their work complete. So I did that today, and sure enough found a bunch more little things I wanted to tweak: a phrase here, a preposition there. I read the whole piece out loud, marked with my trusty red pen, typed up those final changes and then printed everything out. I've probably spent twenty-some hours on this writing sample in the past couple weeks. But I got it in the mail today, and I feel really good about it.

As I did the final read-through today, I couldn't help feeling that my work is at a great place. I've grown so much in the past few years that I think I'm either reaching or on the edge of reaching a new level. If I keep producing work at the quality that I'm currently producing, then I think it's really only a matter of time before I break into some significant journals with some stories and maybe even wind up finding a place (a small press or contest perhaps) for my novel in the next few years. Or if not this novel, then maybe the next one.

It's nice to be at a point where I feel genuinely positive about what I'm doing and confident that I am actually moving forward and not merely spinning my wheels or deluding myself.

Writing Sample

Lately, I've been working on multiple projects at the same time, or rather I'm going back and forth between projects. I've got a story I'm working on that I started last summer. I wrote the rough draft and then have been tossing it about in my head and jotting down notes on where I want to go with it for months. Now I'm writing the next draft of it. Then I'm also in the process of revising my MFA novel again. That's a similar situation. I wrote it years ago, of course. I defended it as my thesis, continued to revise for months afterward, thought I was done, did more revision, really thought I was done, started into the query process, thought maybe I wasn't done, and so on and so forth. I've been jotting down additional notes and planning out a revised structure for the novel for a while now and slowly sitting down to rewrite. I'm tackling the opening of the book first because that's where the most substantial changes are coming in. Some of the new beginning is coming from previous drafts and simply being shifted from later in the book to earlier, but some of it is brand new. So, anyway, I had been working on the novel for a while and then felt more like tackling the story, and I worked on that for several days, but then I felt obligated to work on the novel again.

Obligated is not the right word there. It's not that I feel like I should work on the novel and it's a hassle or something like that. I want to work on the novel. But at the moment I'm thinking about a fellowship I'm going to apply for. I have to get my application packet in this month, and, of course, a writing sample is the major component of the application. And I'm stuck on what to include as my writing sample. If I land the fellowship, this novel is the primary project I want to work on during the fellowship year, so I think it would make sense to include an excerpt from it as my writing sample. Yet which part should I excerpt? The obvious answer is the beginning, but that's the section of the book that is in the most disarray right now because I'm completely reworking it. But if I send a later section, that might indicate to those evaluating the applications that I don't feel confident in the beginning of my book. I've read several places that when querying agents and such and including sample pages, one should include the opening of the book rather than a section from the middle for that very reason. However, applying for a fellowship is not the same as querying an agent; the assumption here is that I have a project that I will continue to work on, not that I have a finished manuscript ready for publication.

Another option is to forget about including an excerpt from the novel as my writing sample and just use a short story (the application doesn't indicate that the writing sample has to be from the project I would be working on). That would show what my writing is like as well as be a complete piece. That might be to my advantage because it's often difficult to judge a part of something by itself. I used to bring in chapters of my novel to workshops in grad school, and a good deal of the time it seemed like my peers didn't know how to comment on it because they had no idea how this one section fit in with the larger story or really what that larger story was. Sometimes when I read the fiction published in the New Yorker I have that problem. They publish short stories, but they also publish excerpts from forthcoming novels, but they don't clearly identify which a given piece is, and sometimes I'll read it and then feel a bit baffled because it was well written but doesn't feel complete at all; then, later I discover that it was the first chapter that wasn't supposed to work on its own. So, for a fellowship application, would it be wise to try to entice them with a slice of something larger or to give them something complete so they can get a better sense of my ability to not just write a nice sequence but to write an entire story?

Anyway, what I've been doing the past few days is working on the beginning section. I figure that if that comes together really well and I feel confident in it, then that would be the best thing to send. But I only have a couple of weeks before I need to send the application off, which is not much time to get a new piece of writing into polished form. So in the likelihood that the opening isn't ready, I have to decide what else to send. I'm leaning toward an excerpt from the novel that works on its own as a story. But that leads to one more question. Do I refer to it as a novel excerpt or as a story? If sending a novel excerpt, I can include up to thirty pages, which would be about two chapters. If sending a story, I can only include one story. I think maybe I'd be better off sending one story by itself (again, that way there are no issues of trying to figure out how the excerpt works in terms of the larger piece), but that means I'd only be using half the amount of space available to represent myself. Would they look down on my application if they only get fifteen pages instead of thirty? Or do they really know after two pages whether they like the writing?

I'm probably over thinking this and would be better off just picking a piece I think is good and representative of my abilities and sending off the application already.

Advice On When To Move On

The topic of finishing, knowing when you're done, is something I've obviously been thinking about and wrote about last time. So to help me consider the issue, I've been reflecting on advice I've received from teachers over the years.

I've studied under some good writers who have given different types of instruction and advice. Perhaps my favorite writer I took a class with had a process very different from mine. He spent months thinking about his stories. He would jot down notes, but basically do draft after draft in his head until he had figured the whole thing out and even polished the language. Then he would write it down, and essentially the first written draft was the final draft. I could never work that way. I simply couldn't keep it all in my head. Also, this professor was a great short story writer and not a novelist. I doubt his process would work on a novel due to the larger scope and the difficulty of keeping so much in one's head. Basically the way he ran his workshop classes was to examine the pieces students submitted, to look at the structure, the techniques, and analyze them. We often got into abstract discussion of about how literature works and why, but often that came at the expense of specific critique of the pieces themselves. Although I feel I learned some things in that class, those things were larger theoretical concepts, and I'm not sure the stories I submitted benefited a whole lot. Probably my professor didn't have much to suggest for how to change a story because once his were written, they were done, so he wasn't much for changing them after that point.

Another professor I studied under was an accomplished novelist. She had published five or six novels and many short stories over the years. One of the specific pieces of advice I remember from her was directly in response to the question of knowing when you're done. She said that is, of course, one of the toughest questions to answer and her best take on that issue was to quit rewriting when she felt like she was starting to make the piece worse. It's been a few years since she mentioned that, and I still reflect back on it as I rewrite, and the tricky thing is that when I approach a piece I haven't looked at for a while, I usually spot things to improve. I have one story I've been working on for over four years, and I revised it again as recently as a month ago, and I think I was still improving it. So on the one hand I think I should continue to work on it since I haven't started completely messing it up yet, but on the other hand I think at some point I have to move on, retire it, and work on future pieces. I don't know that I've reached that point yet with this particular story. Most of the stories I've written over the years ultimately were nothing more than learning exercises, but I still feel this one is good and will be published eventually.

I asked another professor about his thoughts on the issue of when do you know you're done. I suggested that maybe you can tell you're finished when somebody finally publishes something. And he said that even then, it's not that clear. He was at that time editing a short story collection. The stories had previously been published in magazines, and the collection had been accepted for publication. Even so, as he went back through it, he found some stories he still wanted to rework beyond simple edits. I recently read an interview with Tobias Wolff about his new story collection, which includes revised versions of stories he published years ago. And he's certainly not the only writer to keep returning to the past and revising it. So I don't know. I guess the difficulty is to avoid winding up like the writer in Albert Camus's The Plague: he keeps rewriting the opening passage of his novel, trying to get it perfect, and since he never moves on from the beginning, he never completes anything.

I guess I'd rather move forward and accept that some of my past work isn't as good as it ultimately could be, but in the end produce more. If I wind up writing a great novel, but it's my seventh novel and the first six were learning experiences, I still think I'd be happier with that than if I spent twenty years to produce one novel that was ultimately great.

In part my desire to move forward comes from some other piece of advice whose source I don't remember. I think it's important to move on when the passion dies. This is a difficult continuum, however. There are writers who write a passion-fueled rough draft, can't stand to rewrite and so they quit there. That doesn't seem like a good way to go. But if I write, rewrite, revise, rewrite, revise, edit, polish, rewrite, edit, etc., etc. and I've gotten the piece far, but I've reached the point where, despite liking it as a story and feeling it's good, I'm getting sick of it, well I think that's the time to move on. If I'm at that stage with one piece and another piece is taking over my mind more and more, I think it's best to move on to that next piece. Now it's certainly possible that the earlier piece will force it's way back into the passion part of my brain and I'll return to it down the line, but still, it's not necessarily the most productive to rehash the same thing forever.

One final thought on this issue is closely related to that previous idea: as I improve as a writer, I think my ideas get better. I wrote my first novel between the ages of twenty-three and twenty-six. I have no regrets about writing it. I learned a lot from the experience of drafting, rewriting, submitting it to workshops and a writers' group, and ultimately defending it as my MA thesis. But the basic story was not necessarily the most interesting thing in the world. As with many first novels, it drew heavily on my own experiences, and it had the kind of plot that might simply be too minimal to ever be of much appeal to most readers. If I were to continue working on that novel until it reached the level of being a great novel, I suspect it would have to change so much that it would barely resemble the original. So if the final version is going to be so different, why not actually do something different? Rather than being burdened with that history, it's better to start fresh. My second novel moved further from my own experiences, but still has some limited scope. I think this book is good, and I hope to see it published, but I know the story is limited and will not appeal to many readers. But I have other ideas for future novels that have the kind of premises that I think have much more potential to bloom into something great. And I think it's because as I head into my thirties, my views of the world are larger and more interesting than they were when I was in my early and mid twenties. So that's one more reason to keep moving forward, to progress to the next piece instead of rehashing the old ones forever.

Finishing: Yeah Right

So I set a deadline for myself to have an additional revision done in time to enter a contest. I need to have my manuscript finished and in the mail by November first. I've been doing revisions on the computer, printing out the new pages and then going over them once more with a red pen in an effort to catch all the little issues. Last night I got all the way to the end of my book, and so I'm ready to print out the remaining pages and do the final read through and then input the additional edits. I still have a week before the contest deadline, and it definitely looks like I'll make it in time. And the timing couldn't be better.

Unfortunately, my life is squeezing me so I'll soon have even less time to work on my writing. I'm being promoted at the book store, which is great in that I'll make an extra twenty-five cents per hour (Hooray! My income this year might even hit five figures!) and will even soon be eligible for some minimal health care benefits, but I'll also be working more. Rather than being at the book store twenty to thirty hours, I'll be there thirty hours a week minimum. On weeks when I don't have student papers to grade, I'll still be working about fifty hours a week. When I do have papers to grade, it'll be sixty plus hours. This coming week I'm working seven days. And that means the little time I currently find to write will be even scarcer.

Anyway, the sound of violins behind me is distracting. Where was I going? Oh, yeah. Finishing yet another revision. I don't know if I'm actually done. Is it ever possible to be done? I'm sure there are improvements I could make. My newest draft is the tightest, and shortest, version of my book. The length concerns me a little bit. Although it's still a three hundred page novel, double the minimum length for what would be called a novel as opposed to a novella, it's still not a long book. And I have had a few of my early readers who felt like they wanted more, that they would like to spend additional time with the characters. That, of course, is one of the greatest compliments I could hope for, but it also makes me wonder if it should be longer. Basically I have three separate story lines following three major characters, so although the book is one cohesive piece, it's in a way three linked novellas. So I can understand that a reader might want more of each. I have a few ideas for additional chapters I could include, but I'm reluctant to keep writing more. For one thing, I've been working on this for years already and just want to move on. But, more importantly, I feel like the book is tight. Even though it's not a plot-driven book, the major plot points work together pretty succinctly without major digressions and insignificant details. I'd like to think I've got on my hands the type of novel somebody might pick up and feel compelled to keep reading and finish in a couple sittings.

But anyway, I think I might have begun writing this post with some sort of point in mind, though I'm not entirely sure what that point was. It might have had something to do with the old issue of having trouble finishing. I'm pretty sure it was something like that. And the final thought for the moment is this: although I'm sure I could keep working on this book, keep writing new bits and pieces, keep editing for the clearest, most engaging prose, reconsider and evaluate every decision I made along the way, I'm not going to. I'll enter this new version in that contest, look for other such contests, check into small presses who might be interested in a first literary novel, query agents who probably won't be interested in a first literary novel, and move forward with the next novel.

Many times over the years I've had students approach me asking if they could revise a paper an additional time after the final draft in order to improve their grade. For my own sake, I can't keep grading draft after draft; I obviously don't have the time for that. But for their sake as well, I recommend moving on. Instead of trying to juggle one more revision while also writing the first draft of their next paper, it's better to learn from the previous essay and apply those lessons to the next one. And that's what I need to do as well. It might be that my book still isn't where it needs to be, isn't tight enough or long enough or whatever enough to get published. But rather than spending another year on it, I'd rather move forward. I'm a better writer now than I was when I started this book, and the next thing I write should be better than this one. It's possible (although depressing to dwell on) that I'll have four or five novels written before one makes it out into the world. But that's how it is.

Finding Time

As I'm sure any amateur writer can relate, it's tough to find time to write. Not to suggest that my situation is tougher than other people's, but my situation is tougher than other people's. Just joshing. Actually, I think it's in some ways easier to find time to write now than it was back in grad school. It's weird. In grad school, I was there to write. That was the whole point, and yet there were so many other things going on. I was teaching and tutoring, reading and studying for classes, reading and studying for the comps exam, reading and commenting on other writers' work for workshop, grading papers, preparing for classes. With all of that going on at once, it often became a struggle to find spare moments to actually do the thing that supposedly was the point of being there. I mean I still did. I wrote a whole novel and rewrote it and workshopped parts of it and revised and showed it to faculty and revised and defended it as my thesis. I did a lot of writing, more than many of my fellow students in fact. But it still felt hard.

Now I'm in a situation that could also be described as tough to find writing time. I teach as adjunct faculty at a community college, and I work at a bookstore. I'm either in class or in office hours about eight hours a week, plus I spend probably another ten or so at home doing prep work, and that's when I don't have papers to grade or in class assignments to read over, which most of the time I do. So my teaching job is probably somewhere in the range of a twenty t0 thirty hour a week part time position. Then I also work at a bookstore twenty to thirty hours a week. So basically, although I don't have a full time job with the better pay and benefits that come with such employment, I work at least forty hours a week, usually more like fifty or sixty hours a week. Plus, both jobs require a half hour plus commute from home. I sometimes manage to have one day a week where I don't actually have to GO to work, but then even if I stay home, there's teaching stuff to take care of, so it's not really the same as a real day off.

Yet, despite all this, as I wrote above, I feel like I have more time to write. The trick seems to be in using the time I have. For instance, today I taught in the morning, had office hours, and then I have a couple hours before working an eight hour shift at the bookstore. So in that break, I'm obviously writing this blog, but then when I'm done I'm going to sit and go over my novel with a red pen. I've been squeezing in a bit of revising on the computer in the evenings or on afternoons before or after teaching, whenever I have some spare moments and I'm actually at home. Then I print those revised pages and take them with me so I can do even just a few pages at a time on my half hour lunch break. When I take advantage of that free minutes, even when they're few, I can still get work done.

I set the goal for myself to have my novel revised once more by the end of the month. I'm more than two thirds of the way through now, so I think I'll meet that goal in the next few days. It's a tough life, but whose life isn't? Part of what helps me plow through is the thought that time spent writing isn't merely something fun I do for myself (although it is), and it's not only a dream of achieving something that might connect with people (although it's that too), but on a pure practical level, it's a way to advance my career. Right now I'm working this hard because I don't have much option in the way of full time employment. I can't get a steady job, so I have to do what I'm doing. But if I work hard on my writing and get published, new doors will open for me, and I'll be able to land a good full time teaching job that currently I'm not qualified for. So it can be hard to sit down after a long day of working two jobs, or after spending hours grading freshman essays, or simply after sitting in my car driving through freeway traffic, but if I want to be in a position in the future where I don't have to do those things, I have to sit down and do the extra work now. So far I'm doing it. Here's hoping I can keep it up as long as it takes.

As Always: Revision

So It's been a busy few weeks for me that involved not much writing. I moved cross country, settled into my new home, succeeded in finding two part time jobs that provide more hours with less pay than full time work and no benefits. So I have not made a ton of progress toward getting my newly drafted YA fantasy into the next stage. However, I did manage to revise a short story for the nth time, making it that slight bit better where I hope it will now go from getting hand written notes on the rejection slips to actually getting acceptances. I also did my initial read through of the fantasy novel, and I feel although it is of course rough, it has a solid base to it. The skeleton of the story is working, and now I'm ready for the hard work of fleshing out the characters further, making the world pop, and doing all the other stuff that takes so much time and effort but can't be ignored. However, before I get to that, I have something else that I've moved to the front burner again.

I finished what I thought was the final revision of my previous novel several months ago. I'd been working on it pretty steadily for about two years when I defended it as my MFA thesis. From there I moved into working on an additional revision, then all the nitty gritty polishing stuff for three more months or so. I had it where I felt it was ready to put out into the world and even started querying agents. Then I had one of my trusted early readers take a look. She hadn't had the time to read a draft up until that point. And fortunately, or unfortunately depending on how you look at it, she had some great notes for me. For one thing, she found a number of small typo errors that I could have sworn I'd eliminated but somehow still survived. But also, she had some really good suggestions of some places to tighten, some scenes that were redundant, some questions that arose about certain characterizations and so on. Anytime I get good feedback I'm grateful to the person who provides it, but it can also be discouraging because it means my work isn't over. So after talking with her I knew I needed to attack my manuscript again, but I just couldn't seem to find the energy and force myself to sit down and do it. After all, I'd already spent years and reached the point where I was supposed to be done. But one of the differences between being a guy who enjoys fiddling with writing in my spare time and somebody who truly is a writer is in the ability to sit down again and again and find more things to improve.

So I knew I had work still in front of me, but I put it off. I knew I wasn't ready to send it out to more agents or anything until I addressed the new concerns, but I also lacked the heart to do the hard work. But finally I've kicked my butt into gear and said, "Self, you need to do this." But how to motivate myself. After all, it would be more fun to start in on rewrites of the new book. Plus, the old one is a challenging literary novel that even if I succeed in making it great has a limited chance of ever being published while the new one is more marketable and might be possible to actually become something other than a file on my computer or a stack of pages in my room. After some thought I decided I needed something specific and concrete to motivate me, some set deadline by which to finish the revision. It's easy enough to say I won't query any more agents until I fix these little problems and then simply never query any agents. So I decided the best motivating factor to provide a strict deadline for this (hopefully) final revision would be to find a nice contest to enter. And sure enough I found one. I'm planning on entering the novel in a contest for beginning writers who haven't previously published a book. The deadline is the beginning of November, so I have about a month to get it ready.

I don't really expect to win this contest. If I do, that would be great. Not only does the prize include a publishing contract, but the prestige would likely be enough to launch my academic career away from adjuncting and into full time work with a bit of security. But the important thing isn't to think about winning, but simply to think about making my book as good as it can be through one more draft. Then I can query more agents, send it out to small presses, and submit to more contests. And with a deadline hanging over my head, I think it should happen. I've spent many hours the past few days hacking through some problems in the book's opening, and now I've managed to address a number of issues in the first four chapters (including cutting out the false start that was the previous chapter one). I feel confident that even though I'm working twenty-some hours a week at a bookstore, have about forty student papers to grade and two classes to prepare for, I'll have a well-polished manuscript in the mail to that contest before the end of October.