Kim Beall's Blog: Author Blog from KimBeall.com

Wow, it's been a long time since I've posted anything in this blog! My apologies, but, you know what I've always said: I'm not gonna just crank out blog posts unless I have something to say.

OK, I did have something to say, but it was always the same thing: "Yep. Still querying Rivers and Roads, trying to obtain agent representation. Still getting a lot of form rejections, a few personalized rejections (yay) and the occasional, rare, request for the full manuscript (yay!) followed by ongoing silence." Not that I was discouraged. Well, not too discouraged. Just, it wasn't exactly news.

Still querying anyway, though! And I'm going to keep on querying this manuscript until I land an agent or run out of relevant agents to query. I haven't run out yet. Seems that new agents keep appearing every time I think I only have a couple dozen left. New agents come on the scene, other agents decide to start adding fantasy to their lists, and still others have simply been closed to submissions for a while now and have opened back up. So it may still be quite a while before I run out of agents. (Well, or land one!)

I am determined to take as bad a beating as it takes, on this manuscript, before I give up. I really, really need to prove to myself that I CAN DO THIS! That I and this story are both good enough for traditional publishing.

OK I know I and the story are both good enough. But I have no illusions about the publishing industry. I know I chose a hard row to hoe, writing stuff that bends genre boundaries and, even worse, stuff that isn't currently Trending. But trends change daily, and at some point, what I've written will just happen to coincide with exactly what is trending, and when that magical day comes, I and my new agent will be in the right place at the right time.

But that doesn't mean I haven't been writing this entire time! I'm actually working on two projects at the moment - something I once swore I'd never do. The first one is more like what I usually write: think Agatha Christie's "And Then There Were None" meets ghosts and other supernatural beings who, ultimately, help solve the mystery. So there's that. Like I said, it's more like what I prefer to read and write.

But I thought, well, just in case. Just in case it really is not possible and never will be possible for traditional publishers to sell contemporary fantasy for adults that is not grim and full of mayhem, just in case, maybe I can get my foot in the door with a mainstream Cozy Mystery. Readers gobble those up by the metric ton, right? And I do enjoy reading Cozies. I just never felt like writing one was My Thing.

But then! Oh, but then I was gently informed: it is, in fact, perfectly acceptable to have ghosts in a Cozy Mystery! And the ghosts do NOT have to turn out, in the end, to be mere figments of the amateur sleuth's imagination! They can be actual ghosts, completely real within the parameters of the story-world. And there are hundreds of such Cozies already out there, even ones published by traditional publishing houses!

Can you imagine my glee? I practically turned somersaults! (Fortunately I did not, because I haven't done that in over fifty years.) Also... also also! There can be other supernatural beings in Cozies - faeries and land-spirits and all sorts of things! It's a whole subgenre of its own, known as Paranormal Cozy Mystery. How did I not know about this before?

Well, I hit Google and snatched up a small boatload of these novels. I devoured the first dozen or so, loved some of them, and then got to work writing one of my own.

OK I have to say: at first I was underwhelmed with my own foray into Cozy authorhood. I couldn't shake the conviction that I was backing down from My True Destiny. Cozies, for instance, have a lot of restrictions on what can appear on the page. A lot of things in my previous work would not fly with the Cozy audience. But, hey, you can have ghosts and fairies! So I dove in and did my best to build a relationship with this genre. Unfortunately I just wasn't feeling it. Until...

Until this past month when, slowly at first, and then more and more I found myself thinking about the story when I wasn't actually writing. More and more often I suddenly realized someone in the Real World had been speaking to me and I hadn't heard a word they said because I was listening to dialogue between my characters in my head. Waking up in the middle of the night to jump up and write down a connection that had occurred to me while I was sleeping. (I learned long ago not to wait until morning to do this!)

It's been so long since I've been in this place with a story, and now I understand: it's not so much the genre that captures me and drives me to discover the rest of the story. Whether reading or writing, it's the characters and the world they live in that make the story a story worth experiencing. It's the relationships between them that drive the plot. It's getting to know them and care about them that makes me obsessed with telling their story ... and it feels so good to be obsessed again!

Oh, wouldn't it be ironic if suddenly, now, out of the blue I land a Dream Agent who obtains an Amazing Publishing Deal for me with Rivers and Roads, thus tearing my heart most angstfully between Tavisheen and my work-in-progress Cozy Mystery? (Come on, Fate, I'm trying to tempt you, here!)

I'm not going to waste the years I have left writing stuff that doesn't make my heart sing.

The post Five Immutable Laws first appeared on Author Blog: Kim Beall.

Could I get away with this? I don’t suppose it would hurt to try… If it would, please stop me before I do it. Thanks.

The post Realistic Magicalism first appeared on Author Blog: Kim Beall.

I just figured, seeing someone writing "The End" isn't something most people get to do very often.

The post The End (only not!) first appeared on Author Blog: Kim Beall.

The idea was to get all of these beginnings into my head. If any of them should persistently call me back I would, you know, actually finish reading them!

The post Books I Might Not DNF first appeared on Author Blog: Kim Beall.

Here the character breaks their own world with their own hands. They know if they take one more step, they will plunge “down that damn rabbit-hole, where you know you can’t be saved.” But if they don’t take that step, there will be no story.

The post Break Into Two first appeared on Author Blog: Kim Beall.

Yesterday I officially began writing my next series. I’m still not sure how I feel about this, but by the time I was able to stop myself writing I had penned over 4,000 words!

I’ve been planning this, both in my head and on paper, for a long time. That’s probably why the first day’s writing went so smoothly. I’ve been saying, ever since I released A Midnight Clear, that I’d spend the first 3 months of 2021 reading, reading, reading – and then start writing again on April 1. But I have an appointment for my first Covid vaccination on April 1, so I said the heck with it, I’m just going to start writing right now.

I’d been thinking so obsessively about the beginning of the new story for so long that by the time I sat down to write it, I couldn’t stop until I came to the end of ... well, what I’d thought was going to be the first chapter. Turns out it’s probably more like three chapters. Am I overwriting again? That’s what I do. I have set myself a goal of 80,000 words for this first volume which, to make it more appealing to potential agents, is a “standalone with series potential.” I am determined to stick to this low word count. Well, 80K is low for me! I can always edit and make it shorter. I mean, I always have to do that anyway!

This is what some might call my “zero draft.” I write the initial draft by hand, with an actual pen, on actual paper. I understand old farts like me find the hand/body component of handwriting to be beneficial to our creativity. I don’t know about that, but being forced to slow down, if only to keep my handwriting legible, does give my brain time to imagine details and make connections to future scenes in the story. If I write on the computer at first, I end up having to go back and put these connections and details in later. I spend a lot less time fixing plot holes down the road, this way, and a lot less time lying awake at night trying to iron out problems in the story that just don’t happen in the first place when I write by hand.

So in a few minutes I’m going to start typing what I handwrote into a Word document. This will be what I refer to as my “first draft.” While I'm typing, I’ll do a bit of line-level editing.

But! I must discipline myself not to spend a lot of time doing syntactical or atmospheric edits at this stage! I have learned the hard way, after many years of struggling, that if I start seriously editing now, I will get stuck in an endless cycle of rewriting and revising one page, one paragraph, one sentence over and over, and will never finish the actual book. I now make it my strict policy to make sure I am at least 3 chapters ahead with my handwritten draft before I begin typing it in, and eight chapters ahead in my first typed draft before I allow myself to edit anything in previously typed chapters. Once I’ve worked my way to the end of the story this way, that is what I consider to be a finished first draft. After that come second, third, and subsequent drafts.

And so it begins. Again

As I mentioned at the beginning of this post, I’m not sure how I feel about this new beginning. I feel the story itself is quite good – well, has the potential to be quite good – but I miss Woodley, and Cally and Georgie and all the rest. I really fell in love with that whole story-world and its characters, and I did it quite quickly! I still vividly remember how I felt when I left the coffee shop on that first day, after writing the first two chapters of Seven Turns. I felt like my feet weren’t even touching the sidewalk as I walked to my car. I was over the moon – and wishing I had someone I could talk to about what I was feeling! But there wasn’t anyone, at the time. That is actually a large part of the reason I created this blog, to tell you the truth. Just to have someone to talk to about how excited I was about my story, even if it was just a theoretical audience.

Well, I have a wonderful circle of writerly friends, now, and a real-world audience. And I was pleased with myself, yesterday, but not floating. I felt accomplished, but not in love. Cally et al are a hard act to follow, it seems. I like my new MC well enough. And I’m starting to get a little turned-on by the new love-interest, even though he’s only appeared for a few seconds so far. I’m looking forward to discovering the new town and its denizens. It really is a beautiful and intriguing place!

But I remain skeptical, somehow. I really hated having to say goodbye to Woodley, and now this new world feels kind of like a new pet. You know – one you adopt after losing one you’d loved for so long. You know you’ll come to love the new pet just as much in time – and you will! But it hasn’t happened yet.

I guess I should be excited about finding out how it’s going to happen. Well, my new MC is a skeptical type herself, so maybe she and I will figure it all out together!

Yesterday I officially begin writing my next series. I’m still not sure how I feel about this...

The post And so it begins. Again… first appeared on Author Blog: Kim Beall.

Nice notebooks are always at the top of a giver’s list, but I'm going to tell you a secret...

The post What the Author in Your Life Really Wants for Christmas first appeared on Author Blog: Kim Beall.

...I remembered, then! I had written it to explore the idea of what Christmas must be like at Vale House in Woodley, USA.

The post A Midnight Clear is available for pre-order first appeared on Author Blog: Kim Beall.