Fact and Fiction

Welcome to Fact and Fiction

After blogging for a few years over on Write Thinking, I decided it might be a good idea to have a separate blog where I can record the story of my writing journey, from there to here (from the beginning to the present). Perhaps the following entries will serve to encourage other writers, both unpublished and published.

Unlike most blogs, where the newest posts are at the top, this blog begins with the oldest posts and moves forward in time, so that my story can be read in order, from top to bottom, from first page to last. For returning visitors, you can click on the Recent Posts links in the sidebar at left (the most recent post is at the top of the list) to find where you left off.

~robin

teach me to read

My love affair with books began before I could read.

I grew up in a household of readers. It seemed to me that everyone always had their noses in books. My grandma, who lived with us, often had her big old Bible open on her ample lap and other reading materials (magazines and books) open nearby. My grandma was also an actress and a wonderful storyteller. She did professional "readings." She memorized things like "The Gift of the Magi" and performed them at churches and grange halls and many other places. (Somewhere in the house, I have some of her old books with the pencil markings of what to memorize.) My greatest regret is that she died before the ease of recording arrived on the scene. I remember sitting near her chair, listening to her stories with rapt attention. I just don't remember the stories themselves.

Anyway, I wanted to learn to read too. I didn't go to kindergarden, so my first chance to learn to read was first grade. (I don't know why my mom didn't teach me before I started school.) So on that momentous first day of school, I had one goal in mind: to learn to read. But something awful happened. They didn't teach me to read on that very first day. I went home and told my mom I wasn't going back. Why bother if they wouldn't teach me to read?

Fortunately for me, quitting school at the age of six was not an option. I did go back and I did learn to read. See Spot Run.

and so I read

Learning to read was the best thing that could happen to this girl's wild imagination. Yes, I was great at making up stories on my own, but oh my. The places books could take me.

 I still own some of the paperbacks of my youth. I'm surprised these things don't just crumble in my hands when I pick them up. I lost my complete set of Trixie Belden books many years ago (I loved those books!!), but here are the ones that have managed to safely travel with me from childhood to teen years to married life to motherhood to career woman to grandmotherhood (and a total of 11 moves).

Irish Red by Jim Kjelgaard
National Velvet by Enid Bagnold
Hobby Horse Hill by Lavinia R. Davis
Old Bones, The Wonder Horse by Mildred Mastin Pace
Golden Cloud, Palomino of Sunset Hill by Leland Silliman
Champion Dog Prince Tom by Jean Fritz and Tom Clute

I also have some very old copies of Pride and Prejudice and Gone with the Wind and Count of Monte Cristo and The Red Badge of Courage, and a few others.

I have given away hundreds upon hundreds upon hundreds of books and my library is filled with hundreds upon hundreds upon hundreds of books today. Books are a part of the fabric of my life.

How about you?

the storyteller in me

The designation "drama queen" wasn't around in the '50's and '60's, but it would have been a good description of me as a kid.

As I've written on Write Thinking, I had a vivid imagination in my childhood, and I loved to perform. I took ballet lessons for seven years, three of them as a soloist, and several years of piano lessons. I learned to play the flute (long forgotten). I was horse crazy and eventually saved up enough money to buy my first horse when I was 15. In Junior High, I got involved with drama club.

Back up a bit: I was ten, in the fifth grade, when the storyteller in me discovered the fun of entertaining others with words. I spun a tale about how my mom was born on a covered wagon coming west. Even in grade school I loved studying history, and here in southern Idaho a person can still see the ruts from the wagon wheels in the Oregon Trail. That made it easy to slip into that place in my imagination to weave my tale. I had no idea that down the road I would write many stories set in the Old West.

I became what I call a compulsive writer. I can't recall ever thinking, "I want to be a writer when I grow up." I just wrote. Wrote and wrote and wrote. On scraps of paper and on binder covers and in tiny diaries with those itsy-bitsy sized keys. When I wasn't reading a book or pretending to be a horse or entertaining in one form or another or fantasizing in my head, I usually was writing something. It was part of my every day world.

life happened

I had what I would call a normal, happy childhood, even though my dad died when I was a baby. My brother and I were raised by my mom and grandmother, and we had a close-knit and loving extended family. I have fond memories of holiday gatherings when we would play games like "Spoon" around a large dining room table at my aunt's house.

I was a B student, for the most part. I studied hard at the subjects I loved best (English and History) and I did as little as I could get by with in the subjects that didn't interest me much (Science). I went through a rebellious period in high school. I wanted to be a hippy but didn't have the courage, to be honest. I never tried drugs; they frightened me. But I did do a few other dumb teenager-type things.

My family always went to church, but the mainstream Christian church we attended was more of a social religious experience. Truth was there in its long-ago founded doctrines, but that truth was hard to find in the church it had become. So while I believed in God, I didn't know I could know Him. He was distant, up in heaven, like my grandmother.

Perhaps because I grew up without a dad and was surrounded by mostly women, I didn't aspire to any sort of career after high school. More than anything, I wanted to marry and be a mommy. So that's exactly what I did. As it turned out for the career I would one day have, that was the best thing that could happen to me. I lived life. I experienced people. I met heartache face-to-face. I developed empathy, one of the most critical tools for a novelist (to have the ability to put oneself, in heart and mind, into someone's shoes and understand what they think and feel).

My voracious reading habits grew ever more so. I gobbled up books. Historical sagas and romances for the most part, but also history books and biographies/autobiographies and memoirs. I was learning a lot about writing during this time, although I certainly didn't think of it as a learning period. I thought I was simply escaping into wonderful stories of love and adventure.

first attempt

The year was 1973 with winter fresh upon us. Although the U.S. had pulled out of Vietnam, the war continued and P.O.W.s and M.I.A.s were still very much in my thoughts. I was a stay-at-home mom to two girls under the age of five. I had recently purchased a Sears electric typewriter. Believe me, it was one rickety clackity little machine.

I remember snow falling outside my dining room windows as I sat at the table, that noisy, clackity, humming machine that wobbled when I touched it sitting in front of me. I began to write a story about a young mom whose husband was serving in Vietnam. I made it either 7 or 9 pages, single spaced, before I set it aside. Years later, I ran across those pages, and they were bad!

To be honest, when I sat down to write, I didn't think *I want to write a short story or a novel* or *I want to be published*. I was just playing at storytelling. I never thought about being a writer, as I said before. I simply wrote for the fun of it, because I wanted to. Had to, maybe.

Over the next 7+ years, my writing remained journals and letters. My sister-in-law used to pass around my letters to neighbors because she thought they were so entertaining. I found that weird. Why would perfect strangers want to read something I wrote? My s-i-l, yes. She was family. But her neighbors? Didn't make sense to me. But I guess they were my trial run.

Next entry: We'll jump to 1980.

the horse connection

My mom told me my first word was "horse" rather than "mama." That, I believe, was a fabrication - I don't personally remember - but I was horse-crazy from a very young age. I saved up and bought my first horse when I was 15. Marriage and motherhood caused me to sell my horses when there just wasn't a spare moment to ride. So I was horseless for about 7 years, but once my girls were getting old enough to ride and we had a home on an acre, it was time to start riding again.

What, you ask, does that have to do with writing? Well, buying horses got me involved with a small horse association. That involvement eventually led to me volunteering to do the monthly newsletter. After so many issues of "winter is here; give your horse more grain," I grew bored with the non-fiction articles. I started writing more creative filler pieces, like what my filly looked like running through the snow beside her dam. There was something about that regular writing exercise that stirred up a desire in me. I didn't identify what that desire was for many months, but it was there, all the same.

I few months later, I read an article in the newspaper about a local author who had sold her first romance novel. Talk about stirring up a desire in me. For the first time, I thought of writing as something more than a fun thing to do in private, something just for me. It was possible to write a novel and get it published. The desire began to morph into a dream.

the infamous statement

The desire that morphed into a dream (see previous post) brought along with it the kernel of an idea for a novel. My favorite novels at the time were sweeping historical sagas, and one of my all time favorite books was Gone With the Wind. So it wasn't a surprise that the idea was set in the South before and during the Civil War. While that kernel was getting ready to pop, I continued my reading habit, devouring novels one after the other.

And then came that fateful day, that fateful book. It was A-W-F-U-L!! It was cardboard. The characters were wooden. And so I spoke the infamous words that have launched a number of writing careers: "If she can get published, I can get published."

Well, let me tell you. That statement reveals total ignorance. When we say those words, we have no clue how hard it is to write a "real" book. Writing for fun and writing a novel for publication are two different things. A novel needs interesting characters who readers can identify with. A novel needs a plot. A novel needs good pacing. A novel needs a beginning, a middle, and an end. And none of those things happen without effort.

But I spoke them, and within a few weeks I knew I had to put my money where my mouth was, as the cliche goes. So in March 1981, I took a yellow legal pad and a pen and I wrote the opening line of what would become my first novel: Morning burst upon the fields of Spring Haven with bright sunshine and blue skies.

Here's one thing I have learned since 1981: We must always write our best if we are serious about a writing career, but we can only write the best book we are capable of at the time.

I poured myself into that story. I bought a copy of Strunk and White's Elements of Style to brush up on my grammar. I bought Civil War research books and immersed myself in them. I read books on manuscript format and plotting and characterization. And I wrote. Lying in bed at night after my kids were asleep, I wrote my novel on yellow pads. The next day at work, I would type the manuscript on the office IBM Selectric during lunch hours and coffee breaks. I turned my imagination loose in a whole new way.

I finished the book eight months later. Now what?

what's a query letter?

So the novel was done.

I wrote my first book long hand, then typed the manuscript. I didn't use white out. I'd read that the manuscript had to be clean. So if I made a typo, I retyped the entire page. I estimate that I typed about four copies of that book. (I still have the onion skin carbon copy - which tells you how long ago that was!)

Although Romance Writers of America was birthed the same year I wrote my first book, I didn't hear about them for a while. And unlike today when the Internet puts aspiring writers in easy contact with other writers, both published and unpublished, I was alone in this process. Just me and my research books.

I did, however, screw up the courage to contact that aforementioned first time published author to ask her what a query letter should look like. Writer's Market said I needed a query letter but it didn't give me an example. Bless that writer's heart. She shared hers with me.

So after the Christmas season was past, the tree gone and the decorations put away, I wrote my query letter. And then rewrote it and rewrote it and rewrote it. At the same time, I combed through Writer's Market, looking for any book publishers who might be interested in the novel I'd written.

Today's aspiring writers know they're supposed to know their market. I didn't even know what to call my book other than "historical" and "fiction." I'd never heard the term "genre." Now I can tell you it was a "romantic historical saga," but I didn't know it then.

I made a list of 21 publishers and prepared my 21 query letters. I made sure I knew the name of every editor. (I'm great at following directions.) Either ten or eleven of those publishers wanted a synopsis and three sample chapters. But nothing in the instructions said the "first three chapters" so I tried to pick out my best three chapters to send. Oh, groan. Now I realize how dumb that was. After all, what reader bops around in a book, looking for the best chapters? They start reading in chapter one, and if you don't have them captured in those first three chapters, they won't care if chapter ten is awesome.

By the end of January, I'd made photocopies of those three chapters and the synopsis, boxed them up with those personally addressed query letters, and mailed the 21 submissions to New York publishers.

And then I waited.

rejection: 20 ... acceptance:1

Twenty-one submissions went out to New York publishers in January.

I know now that a few of them would never have wanted my type of fiction (like sending a chick lit to a publisher who specializes in SF & Fantasy). Two or three publishers never responded at all. Two requested to see the full manuscript. The rest sent form rejection letters of the "your manuscript does not meet our needs at this present time" variety. [Note: I have a great Peanuts cartoon where Snoopy receives a similar rejection, followed by the sentence, "If it ever does, we're in big trouble." Chuckle.]

I made photocopies of the full manuscript (oh, by the way, the working title was On Wings of a Song) and shipped them off. The Writer's Market said I would have to wait six to eight weeks for a reply.

Full of hope, I got to work on the sequel to On Wings of a Song. By the way, I advise all aspiring writers to do the same. Ship off your book and go to work on the next one. Otherwise, the waiting will kill you. And unless all you ever want to write is one book, this is good practice for the future when you may have deadlines, one right after the other.

Later, I would learn that over 100,000 novels were written every year and less than 1% of them got published, but at the time (1982), I didn't know the odds were stacked against me. [Side Note: I'm pretty sure there are more than than 100k novels written per year nowadays, but I doubt the percentage that get published has changed much, even with the many self-publishing options readily available.]

Well, wonder of wonders! In April, I received a contract offer from one of the two publishers who requested the book. I raced to the library and got all of the publishing contract law books that were available (maybe two or three) and studied them carefully. In short order, the contract was signed and returned and I waited breathlessly for the pittance of an advance I'd agreed to. Who cared about the money? I was going to be published! My book was going to be in print!

When I still didn't have my executed copy of the contract back with the advance check six weeks later (I was supposed to receive it in 30 days), I called the editor. She said she would look into it. That was in June.

By the end of July, I'd finished writing and typing the sequel, but I still didn't have the contract and advance check. So I called again. The phone lines had been disconnected.

In August, upon returning from a camping vacation with my two daughters (I was a single mom, in case I haven't mentioned that before), I learned the publisher had gone bankrupt. Shortly thereafter, I also learned I was going to be unemployed as the place where I worked was closing its doors. The next blow was that I had to move because the house we'd rented in May was being sold.

August/September 1982 was not a great time in my life!