Rachael

So I’m in kind of a quandary. I can’t seem to grab and keep a hero’s first name for Book Three. I can’t tell you details (THE SECRETS! MUST KEEP THEM!) but here’s a little bit about him: He’s a blue-collar successful entrepreneur. He’s sweet (natch) with a tough edge. He’s a jeans and tees guy, but he knows how to wear Armani if he absolutely has to. His nname was Lawson, but argh. Too precious. I couldn’t write more than a page and he was all grumbly about it.

HALP!

E.T.A. Apparently my own personal rule is that his name must include only four letters. Interesting. Huh.

We are back from camping at Strawberry Music Festival. It was the best year ever, for several reasons:

It wasn't too hot or too cold. The sun was just the right temperature to heat you up enough to plunge into the cold lake and the air was just right for sitting under the redwoods and pines, just right for reading, spinning, knitting, or talking. Or drinking. There might have been a little of that. (Although we brought back both booze and money. We must have done something wrong.)

The music was good. Not great, but good. The Avett Brothers were sublime, as always, and Dave Alvin and the Guilty Women were great, as were a couple of other bands, but by and large the music was a big miss, which was surprising for Strawberry.

However, the music at our camp? Camp Hehu? Kicked ass. At any time we had a stand-up bass, banjo, a couple of ukes, guitars, mandola, washboard, mandolin, possibly a fiddle, and lots of voices keeping the tunes going. Saturday night we never made it up to main stage at all. Even though I kept saying I was going, I never stood up, just kept singing and strumming.

There was this great moment when the song was American Pie (it has to be sung at some point during a music festival — it's the law). We were sitting in a circle, maybe ten of us, playing and singing. Then someone else shined a flashlight over my shoulder. I looked behind me and there were at least twenty people there, all grinning in the dark, singing along. I hadn't heard them filter in behind us, and they looked like a wall of humanity, a sea of faces, all singing at once, a total surprise to me. It was awesome.

The other best part, and this takes some backstory, was my Rockstar Moment. Okay, so Book One is called HOW TO KNIT A LOVE SONG. You know that already. What you might not have known is A) I didn't write the title (although I love it) and B) there is no love song in the book. So hey. That's easy. I just wrote a love song. And I called it "How to Knit a Love Song." And because the book is set on a sheep ranch, I made it a good ole country song, and while I was at Strawberry I taught it to a couple of friends with the intention of performing it at an afternoon show called Chickwagon (which we did, which went great). So we'd been practicing my song around camp, and people had heard it while walking past. That's the backstory.

Rockstar Moment: While jamming that Saturday night, from behind me, a stranger's voice in the dark, someone I DID NOT KNOW said, "Can you play that knit and purl song you were playing yesterday?" I about like to died, people. Seriously. Hopefully, in the future, people will tell me they like my writing. That's my goal. But Lala is the rockstar of the family. I'm the writer. Someone liking a song I wrote? I never saw that coming AND IT WAS SO FUN. (Eventually I will get the MP3 up here and a video and you can hear it, too.)

In the meantime, I'm also blogging over at PensFatales today. Come say hi?

Oh, the annoying angst of it all.

There should be a word for the postpartum novel blues. Granted, I didn't actually give birth and my body didn't change physiologically (whew!). But this book took nine months, total. (It only took six months to write and revise which I am pretty proud of, since there was SUCH MASSIVE REVISION, as I believe I might have mentioned in passing before, but there were three months in the middle during which I was working on edits of Book One at the same time, so I wasn't working on Book Two at all. (Gah, what an awkward sentence. And I'm a writer?) But still, to go with my metaphor, the second novel had been conceived in a fit of Nanowrimo passion and was gestating during those months.

Ew. Now I can just imagine my book in my tummy (NO NOT MY WOMB GET THE METAPHORICAL BOOK OUT OF THERE) and it's kind of icky in an Aliens kind of way.

Great. Now I'm angsty, postpartum-ey, and grossed-out. All at the same time.

I'm bummed I finished my book. Nine months later, I sent it out into the world. I don't get it back. I don't get to keep it. (I'm GLAD about that. Yes. But still. It's a strange, empty ache that's stupid, yet real. Dumb. Inexplicable. I should stop trying to explic, already.)

I was so freaked out by Book Two. I can't really tell you how scared I was. The first book could have been a fluke, you know? I wrote a book good enough to get an agent and a book contract, but could I pull it off again? Really? Write a book that was a real book another time? Write The End and mean it? Believe in it myself?

And then I did.

That means a couple of things:

Number One: I am a writer. I think I really know that now. No more fear of the sophomore slump.

Number Two: Book Three is just exciting to look forward to. I have none of the fear, and all of the fun ahead of me. I started a bit of it this morning, just a couple of hundred words. I just splashed my toes. Just because I could.

Number Three: These postpartum blues make me a cranky-ass beeyotch the likes of which I don't want to be around much longer and there is only one cure, and my agent Susanna knew it, and I didn't, and it arrived in the mail today:

 

WOOLBUR!

Don't be afraid to be yourself! That's the message of Woolbur, and my little chickens, it's the best book. There's carding! Spinning! Weaving! Dyeing! And Woolbur does it ALL wrong, and oh, so right. He makes it all work for him, because he believes in himself.

It was exactly the reminder I needed. I just re-read for the fourth time and it cheered me right up. Again. I'm just right. So are you.

Book Three, here I come.

(And as of tomorrow morning, I'll be offline for about five days — no phone, no internet, out in the wilds. Enjoy your long weekend, all. xo)

You know it when you get it — I'm blogging over HERE today.

Whew. I'm having a hard time kicking my butt into gear over here. I'm going to perch on the edge of my chair and have a nice chat with you and then maybe you'll pat my cheek at the end and say, Okay, Rach, get on with it, will you?

You know what? I'm happy about Book Two!

Even better, my agent is happy about Book Two!

I know it must be frustrating for some of you who want to get your hands on How To Knit a Love Song but can't until MARCH to hear me kvetch on and on about Book Two, but indulge me a moment more (also, no guarantees, but wouldn't it be fun if I got an advance reader's copy or two that I could do a random drawing for here on the site? Mmmm? That would be fun. Just sayin'. It's never for sure the author will get more than one, I've heard, in which case I'm SO keeping that puppy, but here's hoping.)

But anyway. Back to Book Two. I can't remember what I told you before but the first draft was written as the premise sold to my publisher: a romantic suspense. After I wrote the whole damn book, it turned out to be TOO OBVIOUS. Oh, yeah? That's the Bad Guy? OH REALLY? DUH! I could see that plot twist from the surface of the moon! So I rewrote it. The whole thing. And it was better, but still clunky and kinda dumb. Didn't feel right. I wanted to throw it against the wall and sometimes did.

But now, with my editor's approval to move away from romantic suspense and back into women's fiction and a MAJOR rewrite that almost kil't me, I swear it did, it's good. It's funny and sweet and it's what it wanted to be. I have a few tweaks that I'd like to make today, but the other day, when I took a day off work to read it over and do a final continuity check (because when you've rewritten something that many times, it's important to check you still have the same characters doing the right things in the right places with the right people), it made me laugh out loud in delight a couple of times. And that was a fine, outrageous surprise. I did not expect that from my own writing. At all. 

(Strangely, while I'm a HUGE laugh-out-louder in real life, I rarely do while reading or watching TV. I can't explain this. It's just true.)

And I do wonder if I laughed out loud because the world of Cypress Hollow is so rich to me because I've been living in it so deeply for the last six months, or because it was good. But I'm willing to let other people tell me that in the future and just be happy now that it happened. 

And only related because Kiersten White is writing about the publishing world, this is a wonderful piece on what it takes to get published. (For those of you who are curious, I submitted queries to thirty-one agents. About half requested partials, and about half of those requested fulls from the partials. That's a pretty high rate of return, and I think it had to do with the market at the time–people were just looking for what I was selling. I was just lucky in that part of it. When Susanna offered representation, I had two other agents who were highly interested. One agent, in fact, missed the boat by a day. BOY, AM I GLAD SHE DID. I'm not sure if I've mentioned it or not, but I have the best agent in the world.)

Okay. I'm getting on with it now. I'm only dragging my heels because once I send it to my editor tomorrow, then it's REALLY out of my hands for a while until she gets back to me with edits. Wait! Why is that bad? That means I'm off camping at Strawberry Music Festival all weekend without a care in the world (except for plotting Book Three, something that I can do under the Yosemite stars, right?).

Are over at PensFatales today. Come say hi!