possibly i am silly – Anica Lewis

You know what is difficult? Querying an agency that asks you to include “a favorite sentence from the manuscript you are submitting” in your submissions package. That is difficult.

What kind of sentence does one choose? I looked back over The Dogwatchers to pick one.

A pretty description? Hmm, I bet lots of people choose bits of description. Plus, I’m not sure I want my ONE SENTENCE TO RULE THEM ALL to be one in which nothing actually happens.

A funny line? Risky. If they don’t think this is funny, it’s a total flop. Plus, it’s hard to find one sentence that’s funny out of context.

My action scenes use mostly short, to-the-point sentences, no one of which is a show-stopper, and many of which make no sense out of context. Dialogue, probably my favorite part of my writing, can be hard to convey well with just one sentence. Besides, the most eloquent characters of The Dogwatchers don’t necessarily talk about things that make for a good One Sentence. (The sentence I ended up choosing does, however, come from dialogue.)

It occurred to me that if the submission guidelines asked for a paragraph, I’d be stumped because I had too many I’d like to send, rather than for the opposite reason. I’m sure the agents do take into account that lots of great lines require setup, but this was still highly unnerving.

What about you guys? Does anyone feel like it WOULDN’T be terrifying to pull out one sentence from a novel and say, essentially, “In my opinion, there isn’t a better line in here than this”?

In other news, I finished making my Halloween costume!

I’m a werewolf! I’m going to be a werewolf of London, but this is just me with the ears and tail that I made. I have a complete outfit, but it’s waiting for Sunday.

Aaand, thanks to the the backgrounds available in Photo Booth, I’m an American werewolf in Paris! Rowr!

Just wait until I get the whole outfit together and wear it to work. That’s what you get for scheduling me for Halloween, Carrboro Branch Library!

I’ve discovered that, when I’m writing, I’m highly sensitive to whether the temperature of the characters’ environment matches the one I’m currently in. I wrote most of The Dogwatchers – which takes place in a temperate place in autumn, but includes a lot of magical snowstorms and the like – while cold. Much of it got done in the barely-heated cottage we had in England during the winter of 2009, and I finished it during a snowstorm last winter. I remember this seeming wonderfully appropriate. Now, though, I’m potentially running up against the opposite happening.

Looking Like Lani has a semi-tropical setting. The characters wear toga-like garments without getting chilly. And the weather here in Chapel Hill is just starting to turn cool.

I don’t anticipate this being too much of a problem. I certainly don’t intend to allow it to become a problem. Far too silly. And I did work on The Dogwatchers during warmer months – perhaps I just don’t remember that as distinctly because it didn’t have the same nice, appropriate feeling.

Still, there are times when I’m trying to write a scene in Looking Like Lani, and the thought of all of my characters in sleeveless garments seems wrong. Apparently, while I’m capable of writing a character who is sad when I’m happy, or who is male when I’m female, or who is an elf when I’m actually a fuzzy kitten masquerading as a human on the Internet*, I somehow have trouble with a character who is warm when I’m cold.

Perhaps this is because, when I get into the writing groove, I can project my mind into the story pretty well, but a temperature difference is an anchor that’s hard to ignore. Like that one movie where the guy time-travels into the past using only THE POWER OF HIS MIND and he’s fallen in love with his dream woman and everything’s CRAZY AWESOME but then he reaches into his pocket and pulls out a penny dated from the year he came from and OH SNAP he gets dragged back to his own time. It’s just like that, only instead of a penny in a time from before the penny was made, I have, like, a scarf in a place where people are chilling in not-togas and wishing they could catch a breeze.

On the upside, this does confirm that I practice body-centered writing, something I’ve always liked, both as a writer and as a reader. If the author stays aware of how characters are physically feeling, it adds depth, realism, and sympathy – everyone knows what it’s like to be tired, cold, or hungry, and many stories are light on the description of characters’ physical states, despite the fact that these tend to be major factors in real people’s in-the-moment experiences. Body-centered writing also makes you less likely to do that thing some people do where they just forget that Our Valiant Protagonist was wounded last chapter, or should really be exhausted right now from that long march, or got rained on and never had a chance to dry.

It has occurred to me that I could start another story, one with a more temperate/cold setting, but this, again, would be exceedingly silly. (And would enable me to continue having a rather ridiculous limitation.) Anyway, I don’t like to have more than one major project in the first draft stage at the same time. I plan to just push through, and suspect the difficulty will fade pretty quickly.

Anyone else run into anything like this?

*Oh no, my secret! And the “Delete” key is too far away for my tiny paws to reach!

On the Upside, You Don’t Have to Cast it into a Volcano

Curse You, Empathy! Or, How ‘Bout This Weather?