Garlic Roasted

Before the Book Roast blog went dark, our beloved Head Chef Chris asked us to roast our WIPs.

So here's Garlic.

Garlic Submissions

The submissions process is off to a slow start, but a start nonetheless. It will pick up steam soon, but I need one more weekend to have this manuscript where I want it to be for this part of the writing journey.

Submissions and responses can take a long time. The longest response time I've recorded so far was over 400 days. That's more than a year to hear back on a manuscript that was requested by the editor in question. Have to admit the time between editor's request and actual submission was much longer than a year. It wasn't ready and life happened a lot in the intervening time.

Writing - excellent practice at delayed gratification.

Garlic Rewritten

There comes a time when I just have to make a change that I really don't want to.

Today was the day that I chopped, hacked and otherwise dismantled 5 chapters of Garlic. After those pages were put back together, they were only 3 chapters long. And the timeframe covered shortened from 2 weeks to 2 days. Editing is still required for the whole manuscript, but at least this one issue is resolved in a way that will, hopefully, make it more palatable to a reading public (but first - the agents/editors/publishers).

Note: Revised timeframe to 4 days. Gotta have some wiggle room.

Garlic Synopsis

I spent a week in boot camp. Not the military kind and this one was done on my computer while sitting at my desk. Erica Orloff ran a synopsis boot camp last week. I ended up with 1515 words of a Garlic synopsis - edited down to 1490 this week.

What I learned: A good synopsis is a short story in and of itself and not a string of "this happens" and "then this happens". Getting descriptions from your novel into the synopsis is a great way to add flavor. Synopses should not be boring.

Easier said then done, but it wasn't the impossible task I'd thought it would be.

Thirteen Black Cats - The Beginning

The Book Roast hosted a 75 word lucky pitch party for St. Patrick's Day. I thought it would be fun to participate, so I wrote a pitch about luck - bad luck. Moonrat chose my pitch as one of her favorites. And Thirteen Black Cats Under A Ladder got it's first words written that day.

It's a lot darker than I expected. That always surprises me. I think I know how a story will be as it travels from my brain through my fingertips and onto the computer screen. But it's like a game of telephone - what winds up on the page is different from what was in my head.

Maybe there are editors hidden in my elbows.

And the winning pitch was:
Curses are for princesses in books, not twelve-year-olds in Cranford, NJ. In THIRTEEN BLACK CATS UNDER A LADDER, Sasha inherits her brother’s curse and the cure he never figured out. She has to step on a crack, find a black cat, walk under a ladder, break a mirror, open an umbrella indoors and spill salt – in the right order, before she turns thirteen or her party will be a catastrophe and she’ll break a leg.

Garlic Draft Done

Whew! I'm finally done with my 30,000 word draft. And it's only 22,000 words over what I thought it would be. Now comes the concentrated editing time. We'll see how many words survive the cut.

How it all started:
I was sitting in a conference room at the SCBWI-L.A. Working Writer's Retreat in 2007, toying with my main character who was half-Vampire, half-Italian. He loved garlic but was allergic to it. He also had no story. The energy, the creativity flowing through those rooms that weekend sparked my imagination in just the right way and Garlic was born.

About halfway through writing it, the story line changed in a not too subtle way. My main character took off and the story went with him. Then I had to figure out how to get him back. I also realized the original idea of the main story arc would not work. It wasn't strong enough. New characters were born, a new conflict arose, and the growth of the main character took an abrupt turn.

So now I am cleaning it up, smoothing it all out and checking that the story line that came to be is clear throughout the whole manuscript. Wish me luck!

Growing The Website

I finally got some time to add a few pages to my website.

http://sarahlaurenson.com