Whiplash Grand Central
“Humble bragging and crying while driving to Starbucks is an odd pairing. But par for the course for the emotional perimenopausal tornado I am. (Sigh).”
Silverwood is loud enough to drown out just about anything, including my own brain, which is exactly what I needed. My baby turned 14 this week, yup she is far from a baby. We spent the whole day there, 3 on 1, three teenagers and me, gates open to gates closed. Braced myself for a sh*tshow and it was stupid fun (even though I feel old and like I have whiplash).
Later in the week I drove through my old Starbucks neighborhood. One of the fire epicenters.
No amount of noise drowns that out. Tears keep falling from my face without my permission every time I see the aftermath. I passed one of our local churches that is just a pile of ash now, foundation and brick towers standing over nothing. The neighborhood behind it is closed off. Looks like a bomb went off. I don't have a clever way to write about it yet. The wreckage is humbling, and I'm not going to force it into anything tidier than that.
Speaking of humbling. I finished the book proposal this week. Comp titles, chapter outlines, and the marketing plan. The marketer in me knows it could be one-thousand percent better. But I know once I have an agent, I can refine things.
Going in, I told myself I had no bonus points this round. Normally I can make anything graphically appealing and win on design alone. Not this time. Text only was the requirement, just the words, standing there with nothing to hide behind.
It felt like a hot f*cking mess. I had the comp, I had the differentiation, and I wasn't starting from scratch, but I still spent way too long arguing with myself about why someone wants to read this damn book.
There's a section in the proposal called Why Me, which is really just a not-so-humble brag of platforms and past publications and whatever else makes an agent believe they can sell you to a publisher. Here is one bullet so you catch mt drift:
“LinkedIn: 32,681 followers (up 2,554 in the past twelve months). 1,291,663 impressions and 368,661 unique members reached over the same period, with 11,306 engagements. Monthly impressions have roughly tripled over the year, from about 24,700 in the first 30 days tracked to just under 79,400 in the most recent 30. Her single highest-performing post of the year, a behind-the-scenes writing update sharing a moment from the manuscript, pulled 149,634 impressions on its own, evidence that this audience shows up for real manuscript content.”
Humble bragging and crying while driving to Starbucks is an odd pairing. But par for the course for the emotional perimenopausal tornado I am. (Sigh).
I learned what an ARC is. Advance Reader Copy, the pre-polish version that goes out to readers weeks or months before launch. Funny thing to write into a plan, because I don't have a pre-launch plan. I don't even have an interested agent yet. But apparently the road from signed to shelved runs 12 to 18 months, so I've decided I'll build a helluva pre-launch plan somewhere in that window. One I hadn't given a single second of thought to until this proposal made me.
In other news, I sent my manuscript to another author this week. We traded drafts to kick feedback around. He's three chapters in and told me “the writing felt authentic, that the details put him on the rollercoaster with me.” I haven't made it far into his yet. So far I’ve read the prologue and part of the first chapter. Once school starts in a few weeks, I will get a semblence of structure back and I will read more.
fun Fact: After I sent the watermarked copy to him I realized that somehow chapter 8 got deleted, and wasn't there at all. Welp! My bad. Once I added it back in the book went from like 56k words to 62k words. Sweet!
To put a bow on this blog, this week was two kinds of wreckage. One is a neighborhood, brick and ash, no metaphor required. The other is a proposal I built by picking through my own rubble and arguing with myself over what was worth keeping, and what should “burn” to the ground.
Things are a mess, but rebuilding has a beautiful way of coming together better than things started. Yes, that was cheesy, no, I don’t care. You’re welcome.
MANUSCRIPT STATS
🔙 Chapter 8 found and restored, 5K+ words back where they belong.
📄 Full book proposal: DONE. Comps, outlines, marketing plan, the works.
📨 Query #7: out in the void.
🔁 Manuscript swap with a fellow author: in progress, feedback already good.
👀 Next: waiting, and building the pre-launch plan.
