I sold a book!

I sold one of my historical romance manuscripts! I've decided to publish under a pen name, so you can read all about my upcoming book (release date still TBD) at my "Susanna Fraser" blog:

Tactics and the Experience of Battle in the Age of Napoleon (Book #97)

One of the hardest parts about exploring a new and relatively obscure topic as an adult is figuring out where to start. (Relatively obscure=any subject you can't take a class on at community college or find a basic For Dummies or similar introduction.) It's not always easy to find the bridges that take you from basic, wikipedia-article knowledge to the kind of expertise you need if you're going to write about a topic yourself. I've frequently requested books from interlibrary loan or shelled out my hard-earned money only to find they're barely more informative than a wikipedia article or else are way over my head.

Way back in 2003 or so when I was first developing the plot for The Sergeant's Lady, I realized I needed to know a lot more about all aspects of Napoleonic-era army life. One of the first books I tried was Tactics and the Experience of Battle in the Age of Napoleon (Rory Muir, 1998). And at the time, it was way over my head. I remember being baffled by the terminology, as if each paragraph was a thicket of thorns I was trying to push through.

Four years later and many research hours later, I tried it again...and found it easy reading. Informative, but easy. So I guess I've been learning something after all. That's encouraging, really--that my mind still has at least some of its collegiate flexibility despite being so busy and out of practice academically.

Back in the saddle

Last week I wrote for the first time in six weeks. It was all of two pages--the prologue for my alternate history. But it felt wonderful to be a storyteller again. I'm all for taking breaks between books or to deal with major transitions like moving, but six weeks is at least twice as long as I like to go without writing. I get all restless and depressed.

I haven't done actual writing since I finished the prologue, which takes place 25 years before the main action and introduces the change that makes my history alternate. (The prologue is the butterfly flapping its wings; Chapter One will be the hurricane. Hopefully a Category 5 by the time I've got it polished.) I'm in research mode now, but I'll be writing again within the week.

Last night I idly wondered what would've become of the characters from The Inconvenient Bride and The Sergeant's Lady in the alternate reality--what would they have done, would the couples have even met, etc. I realized that there was every chance Jack and Anna from The Sergeant's Lady would meet, but under VASTLY different circumstances. At first I thought there was no way for them to be a couple in the alternate world, but I kept poking at the idea and eventually got them paired off, and it's all very lovely and poignant and starcrossedly romantic, if I do say so myself. I feel like I'm fanficcing my own work. It's tempting to make them major secondary characters in the alternate reality, since they're closer to my heart than any other characters I've created, somehow...but it's probably a Bad Idea. If nothing else, Jack's superficial resemblance to a well-known character in the same basic genre would be a lot more pronounced in this version, and while I don't claim to be the most original writer on the planet I don't want to get TOO derivative. But I might write their story for my own pleasure.

I do so love to tell stories.

(Golden) Heartless

Well, it sounds like all the Golden Heart finalist calls have gone out, and my phone hasn't rung all day, so The Sergeant's Lady didn't make the cut. I'm fine with that, for the most part. It does sting a tiny bit, though--it's very much the "book of my heart," so even more than normal I want everyone who reads it to fall in love with it. And obviously, my judges didn't. Oh well. Now I'll just look forward to starting my new book (after we move next month) and going to the Historical Novel Society conference in June.

Golden Heart Time, Part Two

See previous post here. I'd meant to post them within minutes of each other, but got distracted with my daughter's desire for me to play baseball and help her color dinosaurs.

So, on to judging. With both the RITA and the GH, you're judged by a jury of your peers. You have to be published with an RWA-recognized publisher to judge the former, and you just have to be an RWA member to judge the latter, though I think members who have PRO status (unpublished, but have completed and submitted at least one manuscript) get priority. Maybe. I'm not really sure about that part.

What distinguishes the GH from local RWA chapters' contests is that there is no feedback. Instead of getting your manuscript back with a detailed scoresheet and comments and suggestions, you just get your numerical scores in a range from 1-9, along with whether you were in the first quartile, second quartile, or bottom 50% of all entrants in your category. The reason I've heard for the lack of feedback is fear of lawsuits--RWA doesn't want to get sued because one of its members doesn't know how to give tactful feedback. But it also makes sense given the larger scale of the GH. Those local contests average 20-30 entries per category AFAICT, while the GH allows 1200 entries across the 12 categories. It would be a lot of work for the small staff at the national office, and feedback isn't really the purpose of the GH. It's a potential career boost for writers on the verge of publication. I'd never advise entering the GH as your first contest--better to try a few local ones first, see how other writers react to your work, and if you're finaling or coming close to it, THEN shell out the bucks for the GH.

All that said, it still bothers me a bit that the most important contest in RWA's world has the least quality control. I judge a lot of local contests, but if I was a vindictive or incompetent judge, I wouldn't get to keep doing so for long. My mean spirit or ignorance would show in my comments, and contest coordinators wouldn't keep inviting me back. But with the GH, there's no way to know. I've heard stories that make me wonder, like a friend who got a 2.0 from one judge the same year her other entry finaled. To me, a 2.0 is the kind of score you'd give an entry that showed an utter lack of competence at grammar and craft. And I know that's not the case with this writer. For starters, I've read her work. Also, she's published now. Her first book comes out in May, and IIRC it's the one that got that ridiculously low score.

I've heard plenty of similar stories, so I think there are GH judges out there who have no business judging. (Incidentally, I'm not speaking from personal experience here. I'm obviously not thrilled* with how The Sergeant's Lady scored last year, given that it didn't, you know, final, but none of the scores were out of line with what a competent, qualified judge who just happened to have different criteria for what makes an ideal romance than I do might assign.**) And I'm not sure what the solution is. The best I can come up with is something I suggested to the board when they asked for feedback on the contests: I said that each judge should write a few sentences per entry justifying her scoring, not for the entrants, but for the national office to review. That way they could weed out obvious incompetence, and maybe judges would feel a certain constraint not to be petty or arbitrary. Or maybe there should be mandatory training, or only people who've judged X number of local contests should be eligible to judge the GH. But I'm not sure any of those ideas would work. Maybe there isn't a solution.

* "Not thrilled" is perhaps an understatement of my reaction when I first received my scores, which IIRC ranged from 5.0 to 7.8 and were mostly in the 6's, putting me in the bottom 50% of my category. After a couple of finals and several near-misses in local contests, that bottom 50% finish was quite a blow. But nearly a year later, I've gained some perspective. I'll never know what those scores really meant, but they don't undo or negate every bit of good feedback I've ever gotten on the manuscript.

** There's really nothing anyone can do about the fact there's an element of subjectivity in judging. For example, I try my best to be a fair judge, but I can't completely check my tastes and personality at the door. I'm probably tougher on historical accuracy issues than average, and more lenient on whether the characters' goal-motivation-conflict is handled just the way it's taught in RWA workshops. There's nothing I love more than a good Regency, but I'm also more sensitive to cliches or factual errors in the subgenre just because I know the era so well and have read so many books set in it. I try to be aware of my biases and not let them impact my judging too much, but I don't think I can get rid of them altogether. And I'm sure every other judge is the same way.

Golden Heart time, Part One

A week from today, RWA will announce the finalists for its two big contests: the RITA for published authors and the Golden Heart for the unpublished. I'm entered in the GH with The Sergeant's Lady. I'm not really expecting to final. Last year the same manuscript didn't even come close, and I haven't made major changes beyond improving the synopsis quite a bit. On the other hand, it's finaled and gotten high scores in local contests in the past, so who knows? It all depends on the judge draw really, whether your writing is to their taste, once you've passed a certain threshold of basic competence WRT craft.

In a way, it shouldn't matter if I final or not. I've already decided to do the Historical Novel Society conference this year instead of RWA National, so I won't get to enjoy the perks of being a finalist at the conference. But, you know what? I want to final. I can't help it. I'm competitive, for starters. And I love that story and those characters, so I want everyone who reads it to love them, too! So I'll take my cell phone to church with me next Sunday (set to vibrate, of course) and try to get an outside aisle seat. Just in case, you know.

There's been some discussion in the blogosphere the past few days, not quite rising to the level of a kerfuffle yet, IMO, about the value of the published award, the RITA. It started with this post by Barbara Samuel at Romancing the Blog and has continued over at the Smart Bitches (where Nora Roberts and Jennifer Crusie have both weighed in). In some ways, it's the kind of discussion you could have about the Oscars, the Emmys, the Booker Prize, Olympic figure skating--anything subjective. Do the best stories win, or the safest middle-of-the-road ones by authors with established fanbases? Why doesn't the RITA have the same status in romance reader eyes as the Hugo and Nebula have for sf/f readers?

Most of those questions don't apply to the GH. We're unpublished, so there's no question of winning the GH because you're popular or as sort of a "lifetime achievement award" for a mediocre book because people belatedly realize you ought to have won several times in the past. And while a GH makes a nice credit when querying editors and agents, as an unpublished award it's obviously meaningless to the reading public. But there's also discussion of categories and judging, which are equally relevant to the GH.

There are currently 12 categories common to both contests, with two additional for the RITA only (Best Romantic Novella and Best First Book). Some of the category divisions are obvious--it makes complete intuitive sense to me that Young Adult and Inspirational romances are categories apart. But there are fully three categories for historical romance (Long Historical, Short Historical, and Regency, the latter being for the unfortunately-nearly-extinct traditional Regency rather than the highly popular Regency historicals, which compete in LH and SH). FOUR for contemporary romance (Single Title Contemporary, Short Contemporary, Long Contemporary, and Traditional, the latter three basically for the various Harlequin/Silhouette lines). And I really feel like those need some streamlining. I don't read enough contemporary to feel like I have a right to speak to how to trim the categories, but as a historical reader and writer I don't see the point of three categories. Regencies, much as I love them, are on life support. There simply aren't anything like enough of them being published to warrant a separate segment of the contests. And as for short and long historicals, I just don't get the point of the distinction. Maybe it's rooted in some bit of genre history from before my time, but length has nothing to do with how I evaluate a book, as long as it doesn't feel too pared down or padded out for the amount of story the author has to tell.

This is getting long, so I'll put my thoughts on judging in a second post.

Sharpe's Company (Book #107)

Sharpe's Company (Bernard Cornwell, 1982) was my airplane book for our journey from Seattle to Tulsa yesterday. It's one of the earliest Sharpe books in terms of publication, and it's a solid, page-turning entry, though Triumph, Trafalgar, and Gold remain my favorites. It covers the early 1812 sieges and storming of Ciudad Rodriguez and Badajoz, two key fortresses on the Portuguese-Spanish frontier. The British needed both cities to advance into Spain and stay there, and they paid for them dearly, particularly at Badajoz, in terms of casualties--some of the hardest-hit regiments had 25% casualty rates.

I read Company with particular interest because I used Badajoz as part of the setting for The Sergeant's Lady. I don't think my research steered me wrong--it plays a very different role in my plot and takes up a MUCH smaller portion of the page count, but it reads like the same battle.

RWA Contests: Subjectivity

Every judge's instruction sheet or training class I've taken part in has urged judges to check our personal tastes at the door. You may prefer medievals to Westerns, but that shouldn't influence your scoring. If you hate vampire heroes, you really shouldn't sign up to judge the paranormal category. And if you have some narrow, specific turn-off and you get an entry that hits your hot buttons, you should send it back to the contest coordinator to be assigned to a different judge.

But it's impossible to achieve complete objectivity on something as subjective as what makes a well-written, enjoyable story. As a result, you can and do see scores that are all over the map for the same entry and the same scoresheet. I've seen this as both a judge and an entrant. As a judge, I'll read some entry that blows me away and think, "That one's a finalist for sure," only to discover after the first round is over that the other judges gave it mediocre scores--what I saw as A+ writing, they graded C-. And just as often, especially in contests that drop the lowest score, some entry that I thought was deeply flawed or just plain boring and average will make the finals.

As an entrant, I tended to get wildly diverging feedback. In the 20 or so contests I entered, I almost always got at least one very high or even perfect score--but I only got enough judges who liked me in the same contest to make the finals twice. This supposedly is a sign of having a strong, distinctive voice, and since that puts a flattering spin on my relative lack of success in contest-land, I choose to believe it.

But the last contest I entered with The Sergeant's Lady highlighted the subjectivity issue perfectly. I got Goldilocks feedback. One judge thought my story was too hot, another too cold, and the third just right. Literally. The issue in question was chemistry between my hero and heroine, and they were looking at my first 30 pages.

I deliberately play my characters' attraction more subtly in the early going than is typical in the romance genre for two important reasons: 1) In the first chapter, my heroine, Anna, is still married--her husband dies around p. 25. Though her marriage is miserable and we can see that her husband is a jerk, I don't want her to come across as someone who's looking to commit adultery, so I don't let her attraction to the hero, Jack, become overt until she's safely widowed. 2) Anna and Jack come from far enough apart on the social scale that they wouldn't naturally see one another as potential mates. To get past this, I opened the story by throwing them into a crisis that forced them to work together, which makes them get to know and appreciate each other as individual human beings as opposed to members of the categories Highborn Officer's Lady and Lowly Enlisted Man. But the class difference is still a pretty huge barrier (and the major conflict of the story), so I tried to write them as having a kind of chemistry and mutual attraction that the READER will notice, but that the characters themselves are oblivious to until a few chapters later.

I put a lot of effort into striking what I felt was just the right tone with their early interactions, and I'm pleased with the results. But in this case my judges read it three very different ways:

- Judge #1 thought it was too hot--she was troubled by ANY sign of attraction when one of the characters was still married to someone else.

- Judge #2 thought it was too cold--she didn't see any physical attraction or desire on the page.

- Judge #3 thought it was just right--she loved the entry in general, and specifically praised how I dealt with the characters' chemistry and attraction.

Naturally I think Judge #3 has wonderful taste, but can I really say that the other two are wrong? I don't think so. They just value different things, and I can't fault them for calling a perceived problem in my story as they saw it. We're in a subjective business, and contests are as good a way as any to get used to the fact that you'll never please everybody.

Golden Heart obsessing...

Next week I'm planning to post about RWA contests--my experiences as a judge and entrant, with maybe some tips on avoiding the most common flaws I see in the entries I judge. I judge a lot of contests, you see. I have trouble resisting those "judges needed!" pleas that go out on the RWA email loops. As my mother used to say, if you want to get something done, ask a busy person.

Now that I have an agent, I don't enter as many contests as I used to, but I did enter The Sergeant's Lady in the Long Historical category of the 2007 Golden Heart, which is the RWA's big annual national contest for unpublished writers.

It's been a month since I mailed my entry, and it'll be ~3 months before I know if I've finaled. So the logical thing to do would be to not think about it until the day finalists are notified. But I still spent a good chunk of my shower time this morning wondering if for contest purposes I should've cut the section from Ch. 2 that's setting up a subplot that doesn't bear fruit until later in the book, or if I should have tried for a longer and more detailed synopsis, since I ended up several pages under the maximum allowed. And was it the right choice to use TNR to end on a strong hook, or should I have used Courier even though it would've meant stopping a chapter earlier on a less dramatic hook?

My stories thus far...

In the possibly vain hope that anyone besides my husband, my MIL, and a handful of critique partners ever happens across this blog, I figured I should describe just what it is exactly that I write:

I started writing in third grade, when as part of a class project I wrote a longish short story, something like 20 single-spaced typed pages, about a group of children drawn into a magical realm with talking horses. Yes, I was reading the Chronicles of Narnia at the time. Yes, I was a stereotypical horse-mad girl. It was the most fun I'd ever had on an assignment, and it planted a seed in my mind that I'd like to do more of this.

All through junior high and high school, I wrote semi-autobiographical wish-fulfillment teen romances set in small Alabama towns. (I grew up outside Birmingham.) The heroines were just like me, only they were petite and had curly red or black hair instead of straight brown, blue or green eyes instead of brown, played clarinet, flute, or trumpet instead of saxophone, and they actually GOT the cute drummer, trumpet player, or wide receiver. I never got much beyond Chapter Three, maybe because I couldn't really imagine myself getting the required happy ending.

I didn't write in college, but during my senior year I got an idea for an epic fantasy series. A year or two after graduation, I started work. I filled notebooks with my worldbuilding notes and got a good ten chapters into Book One of my planned trilogy. I very well might have finished it, but somewhere along the way my politics shifted a lot and my theology shifted a little, and I found I no longer believed in my basic premise enough to continue writing it.

For a few years afterward I didn't write. I'd concluded that I just wasn't the type who finishes things, and that I therefore wasn't meant to be a writer. I got married, moved to Seattle, and started looking at graduate school, though I wasn't sure what I'd study or what I wanted to do with an advanced degree.

Then one evening my husband and saw the 1999 adaptation of Mansfield Park. All the way home from the theater I talked Dylan's ears off with all the things I would've done differently if I'd been adapting MP for a modern audience. In the weeks that followed, I couldn't get the idea out of my head--how would I show a modern reader what might make a strong, intelligent woman act as meek and mild as Fanny Price, all without violating the historical realities of the times? It grew into a story in my head, a story with the same initial set-up as Mansfield Park--a poor relation goes to live with her wealthier and better-bred cousins--but I started changing things from there. Among other things, I made the Henry Crawford figure the hero, largely so the story would be different enough from the original to justify its existence, and I made the Edmund Bertram figure a cavalry officer rather than a clergyman, a random choice that would have major implications for the eventual direction of my writing. I thought about the idea so much that I eventually started writing it down to make it go away. I was sure I'd get three chapters in and quit, just like always, and that would be that.

Two years later I had my first manuscript, LUCY AND MR. WRIGHT. With the blind confidence of the newbie, I was sure that the publishing industry would be blown away by my brilliance and immediately offer me a three-book contract.

Bzzzt! Wrong. After assorted rejection letters and mediocre scores in RWA contests, I was forced to admit that maybe the story DID lack conflict, and that maybe I wasn't yet God's gift to writing. Rather than keep tweaking and rewriting it, I decided to bury it under the bed and work on my next project. It happened to be a sequel to LAMW, but one that I thought worked well as a standalone. I had a secondary character, Anna--my Mary Crawford figure, though she never resembled Austen's character in much beyond being my Henry figure's sister--who'd started out as a sort of amiable ditz. In those first drafts, my Edmund figure (Sebastian) was dull but well-intentioned, so I figured he and Anna deserved each other. But as the story evolved, Sebastian turned into an actual villain, cold and misogynistic with a streak of cruelty, and I realized that the one thing that Anna wasn't was stupid and fluffy--young, clueless, very spoiled and not a little vain, sure, but smart as can be, intensely passionate, and honorable to the core. IOW, heroine material. Since the plot fell apart without it, I made her marry Sebastian anyway, but I promised I'd kill him in a year or two and give her someone better.

During the time I was writing LAMW, I'd turned into a Peninsular War buff, so I decided that Anna would follow the drum, Sebastian would die in the war, and Anna would find a soldier worthy of her. For years I'd wanted to write a cross-class love story where the lower-class character didn't miraculously turn out to be the long-lost child of a lord in the last chapter, so I decided this would be that story. And so THE SERGEANT'S LADY, the manuscript my agent is currently shopping, was born. Here's how I describe it when pitching to editors:

Highborn heiress Anna Arrington cannot mourn the death of her cruel husband, a captain in Wellington’s army. All she wants is to leave the battlefields of Spain behind and return to her beloved family in Scotland.

But when her journey home turns perilous, Jack Wilcox, a common sergeant of uncommon courage and intelligence, rescues her from an unspeakable fate. Fighting their way to safety through dangerous, contested territory, they spend four days alone together--and discover a passion far deeper than either has known before. But Jack and Anna must return to a world that would never condone a match between a sergeant and a viscount’s daughter. For such an unlikely pair, building a life together will take a battle...

By the time I finished TSL, I decided I wanted to revisit LAMW, but the plot has changed so much that I consider it a completely different book (now titled THE INCONVENIENT BRIDE). I haven't recycled a single word of the previous version. It's still several months from being done, but since I'm a freak who actually enjoys writing pitches and blurbs, I already have one for it.

THE INCONVENIENT BRIDE is the story of Lucy Jones, an orphaned poor relation in 1809 England who wants to provide her younger brothers with a good start in life. But when the man she's always loved abandons her for a beautiful heiress, she must marry that heiress's brother or see her own brothers thrown into abject poverty.

So. Those are my stories so far. I'll try not to make a habit of lengthy posts, but sometimes when I get talking about my writing I just keep going and going and going...