The Querying Process: A Play in Gifs Starring Ichabod Crane

The process of querying is a tumultuous one. Writing a single draft of a novel alone is enough to send us screaming back to the cubicles from whence we came. The idea of polishing said draft into something that is legible, intelligible, and altogether tolerable is another hurdle entirely. Sending it out into the world can be a bit like a parent watching their child leave for college for the first time. Exciting! But also filled with foreboding joy.

There's the first stage. You've finally 'finished' your draft. It's beautiful and shining and ready to take on the world. You've decided the best way to midwife this sucker into the arms of millions of readers is to find an agent who thinks your work is brilliant and doesn't hate you too much.

You shuffle around the internet and make an involved and lengthy list of literary agents you just know will go ape for your darling book. You then spend an inordinate amount of time scoping out their credentials to see which one is the perfect match. It's kind of like online dating, minus the creep factor.

Okay, if there's a chance that anyone's creepy, it's you. That's beside the point.

Try to get to know the agent as well as you can (without being creepy), before querying them.

Then send out queries for days and weeks while also maintaining some semblance of your normal life. Sick days are not allowed for the intrepid writer.

Being testy with your loved ones who irk you to no end about how your writing process is going is also not allowed. They are, afterall, merely Muggles. You must forgive them.

After all the queries have been sent out it's time to sit back and access other important things in life. Otherwise known as "Waiting Impatiently".

In the end you will hopefully have found an agent that adores both you and your work. Or maybe just your work.

The Writer's Minimalist Uniform

Minimalist Uniform by lucywiggins featuring a white shirt

 I was talking to a friend the other day (a couple months ago) about how it would be so much easier if artists and writers had a go-to outfit. Something that was fairly standard, but could be altered by mixing up the accessories depending on the occasion. I had been thinking about making this idea a regular feature here, and therefore jump firmly back onto the Polyvore bandwagon. Because why not? 

Here I've concocted the Minimalist Uniform for the imaginative writer. Combining a very neutral palette with a few interesting and simple accessories, this uniform is for the writerly woman who wants to go as unnoticed as possible but still remain chic to the core. That is, until someone notices her shoes. A closet Francophile or Wannabe Introvert would also don an outfit like this, or something similar, to waltz through the Natural History Museum and take notes about different species of wildcats while enjoying air conditioning and an overpriced latte.

Fine Feathered Friends

Ducky on her wedding day. Photo by Amaris Photography.

This is a hard entry to write, because it deals with death. Normally death isn't hard for me to write about, a lot of the themes in my stories deal with death in various forms. Death in real life, however, is something that takes a while. The words don't form as easily as the tears do. There are more emotions bound up like braided hair and only with time does it come untangled.

My friend Rachael died.

I called her Duckling or Ducky. Rarely ever did I call her by her given name. There was no reason for this- it's just how we were. She called me silly otter. I called her Ducky.

We met in college. There were professors and friends who had been telling me for a while that there was a freshman artist that I needed to meet. When we finally did get to hang out we instantly bonded and couldn't be separated for very long.

Ducky was one of the few people at college I didn't feel like I had to hide from. There were others of course, I was blessed with a tiny abundance of beautiful and brilliant beings that didn't mind calling me a friend. Some things were different with Ducky. She didn't communicate well through words, or so she said, but she could communicate through colors and compositions. She followed the light and the shadow with her camera and captured the mundane in such a way that it looked extraordinary. I learned to see the world around me differently, and felt a little less alone for it. She would shake her head and smile and tell me that I was crazy. Somehow we endeared ourselves to the other.

Photo by Amaris Photography.

She would come to my room late at night and stay until the early hours of the morning. I sketched her once and the picture is framed and hanging in my kitchen as it has been for the past five years. I look at it with new meaning now. She is sitting on a pile of junk I had heaped up in an unused corner of the room. I had hubcaps that I decorated the wall with, and art supplies strewn around the floor with empty boxes and godonlyknows what else. She sat content on her hoodie she used as a cushion, and with her drawing board that was half her size she sat and worked out a composition that she was never satisfied with but was always one of the most beautiful things she ever did. I sat from my bed and watched her as she worked in spurts of sighs and reveries. My sketch wasn't perfect either, by anyone's standards, but it was raw and beautiful and real. It is one of my favorite pieces I have ever done.

Photo by Amaris Photography.

I have other pieces of her throughout my home. In the living room there's a painting that I finished the night she and the aforementioned mutual friend came up to spend the night. I was living in my apartment above the Bistro, the apartments that once upon a time had been a brothel, and we drank vodka and talked and danced and played Dana Fuchs until the wee hours of the morning. When both my guests had collapsed from exhaustion, I kept on playing music and drinking and began to paint.

The painting had been one that had me stumped for about two years or more. I hadn't finished it because I couldn't get the colors I wanted to use bright enough to suit me. After seeing some of Ducky's work I decided to change the color scheme and loosen up my brushstrokes. What emerged is the painting that turned the tide in my confidence and in my artwork. It's literally everyone's favorite piece of mine and one of the few I've hung up with sheer pride. All because of Ducky.

In the bathroom is the rubber ducky that I took from my senior prank at Meredith. I bought 107 pirate rubber duckies and nine of us sneaked out into the quad at three in the morning to dump them in the water fountain. It was a memorable event, and each of us took a souvenir ducky with us.

In the bedroom is probably the most meaningful piece of memorabilia that I have, and also the only piece that was from Ducky herself. I framed it a long time ago and have it sitting on the chest where I keep my photos and my journals. A letter she had written me two months before my graduation, telling me how she loved me and my words and how she was going to miss me when I left. She told me to keep writing, and quoted a line from my own poem as well as Robin Williams. (She knew me well, safe to say.) She signed it <3, Ducky in orange marker.

 I was standing at the sink in the bathroom getting ready for the day when I got the news. A friend of ours had been keeping some of us in the loop in regards to Ducky's status over the past several months over Facebook. It seemed weird to me at the time to get such news over Facebook, but there it was. I started sobbing instantly and had to ring my mom up at work to have someone to talk to. Mom cried with me and soothed me as best as she could, and after we hung up I slumped onto the couch and cried. It was cardiac arrest we were told. Not uncommon for those who have been immobile for so long. My mother explained that it was likely a clot that had traveled to her heart.

Ducky and her husband, Steve, on their wedding day. Photo by Amaris Photography.

 It would be easy to sit here and talk only about my suffering and how much I miss her. But someone like Ducky doesn't leave behind only one person to grieve the loss of her life. She left behind a colorful legacy and a beautiful husband and daughter and numerous others who won't forget how much she touched our lives and meant to us. In college, people told me that Ducky was lucky to have me around, but in reality it was the other way around. We were all very lucky to have a friend like Duckling.

Filling Up on Life & Easter Sunday with Amanda Effing Palmer

"You are all godless people."

There she was, and there we were. She looking like a Mucha painting come to life wearing a floor length tuxedo jacket and her painted eyebrows and jealousy inducing bone structure. There I was sitting with my brother and sis-in-law, squinting to see through my out-of-date contact lenses to the lady on the stage. Amanda Effing Palmer. So Effing Awesome.

I'll back pedal a moment here to say that, since my last entry, I've been a whirling dervish of hope and sadness as I rode the waves of unemployment and creativity. There's only so much you can do when you're anxious and having panic attacks at three in the morning. I'd finished the rough draft of a novel, a short-short story, a handful of poems, and even a few paintings. Yet it didn't feel like enough. I felt like I had to legitimize my being out of work by at least being productive in my creative pursuits while also job hunting like it was my job and figuring out how to dumb down my resume enough that someone might hire me.

The welcome mat at my uncle's.

Easter weekend brought a big sigh of relief and release. It's family tradition to go up to my Grandmother's home in the Shenandoah valley and have a big meal with all the family around. My parents and I had gone up a few days early. We set up camp an uncle's house, said uncle had left the day before for a vacation, so it was just the three of us for a couple of days.

There's no internet. All the furniture is older than me and my parents' ages combined. There is a television, but I don't watch much of that anyway. And come to find out- the plumbing is questionable at best. We discovered that last bit when I flushed the upstairs toilet and a leak sprung up in the downstairs one. Tree roots had invaded the line underneath the house. The issue was fixed, but I was distrusting of the toilet from then on.

It sounds almost like a punishment to those who simply have to have internet access 24/7, or have to have a television. But in reality it was exactly what I needed. I couldn't job search online. I couldn't update my blog. I couldn't do much of anything.

It was so great! I could fill up on life for a while.

Hoppy Easter, y'all!

I spent the time instead with family. Easter Sunday rolls around and we gather like we do and eat as much as we like and there's an egg hunt and bubble blowing and squirrel hunting. I say my good-byes and with my brother and SIL we headed down to Richmond.

The National is filled with sweet and harmonious fans. Ourselves included. Hair colored like Easter eggs or candy floss dot the landscape of the crowd as we all shuffle in. One of the staff members and I compare cat scratches on our arms. We get our beers and rifle through the pages of Amanda's books right before she comes on stage.

And then she's there. Waving her ukelele and she begins to belt out her tunes. The evening goes on and it's the most polite concert crowd I've ever seen. Amanda of course notes this and as she is taking song requests someone asks to hear "Dirty Business". Amanda asks for someone to come up and Google the lyrics since she can't remember them all. Hilarity ensues.

. @amandapalmer calls on some fan assistance to help her with the words for fan-requested "Dirty Business" http://t.co/NsUVu84MMW
— Jaime (@wojo4hitz) April 6, 2015

The night wares on and there's the "Ask Amanda" portion of the show. She answers a few questions and the one that stuck in my head was someone asked "How do you stop being afraid of everything?"

It's a good question because we've all been there. Even the person on stage who is the most successful, creative, and fiercest person in the room. She tells of how she's afraid of everything all the time, but that she goes ahead and does it anyway. Is she still afraid? ABSOLUTELY! But, she says, she could either be afraid and not do the thing, or she can be afraid and do it anyway. Ultimately the answer is clear to her.

I thought about what I was afraid of, and for the sake of not making this entry any longer than it already is, I'll say that there's a lot  that I am afraid of. I'm afraid that I won't pass my massage therapy license exam, I'm afraid that nothing I write is worth publishing, I'm afraid that anything and everything I do is going to be excrement and that's it's not worth doing at all.

Well.

I don't have much choice. I can be afraid and not do anything, or I can be afraid and do it anyway. Here's to what comes after doing it anyway.