Book Birthday! Starting with Goodbye makes its official debut. Hello World!

I'm almost always awake past midnight anyway. But I'm not usually watching the clock to tick into the new day. Maybe it is a bit silly, wanting to drink in the first moments of the first day when my first book is birthed. That's okay. I'll take silly. 

When the FedEx delivery guy pulled up late yesterday afternoon, I met him at the bottom of the front steps with outstretched arms. "This is a pretty heavy box. You sure you want to carry it?" he asked. I was sure!

Tucked inside along with my author copies was a beautiful card signed by everyone on the editorial, production, and marketing team at University of Nevada Press, all those I've come to know over the last 14 months, everyone who brought the book to life with such passion. (Everyone who put up with me and my constant questions!)

They're the folks who made this gorgeous video trailer. Please take a (36 second) look!

For those who would like to read the book, you can order online from many retailers, small or large, indie or the big guys. I've gathered all the options, linked for you here. And of course, I'd love nothing more than if you wandered into your own nearby independent bookstore and asked them to stock it (or at least order you one!).

If you'd like a signed copy of Starting with Goodbye, you can do so via Watchung Booksellers, my nearest local independent book store. Simply note, "signed please" in the Order Comments box on their Checkout page. (Also specify if you want it personalized or not.) 

On our way out to a little celebratory dinner tonight, we may stop off at Watchung, where a friend spotted this: 

One day soon, I'll head over to WORDS Bookstore, a little bit further away, where a friend, out for her morning walk, reports that we're already window dressing! 

Readers who are writers, I've learned one thing well. Books take time. They take as long as they take. This one took a long time. But now that its time has come, the time merely seems right.

Thank you, blog readers, for allowing me to share my excitement with you! For staying interested in what I was doing and had to say over these past 11 years since I started this blog, way before there was any book in sight. You're the best.

Memoir Book Report, Part V: Weathering the Query & Manuscript Submission Cycle, from Confusion to Contact to Contract

Fifth in a series, following Starting with Goodbye: A Daughter’s Memoir of Love after Loss, from manuscript to published book (University of Nevada Press, May 1, 2018). Find the rest of the series here.

Once I got a publication date, other writers began to ask: How long did the submission process take? What was it like? How did you find your publisher?

The short, pithy answers: Eleven months. Hell. Not the way I thought.

That’s handy shorthand, but hardly helpful. Here’s the longer story, the one from which you might glean some helpful hints.

I first thought I might have a book percolating in 2012, when I realized that many of the essays I was getting published, might add up to…something. Quite a few were connected thematically around my father’s death, and I thought if I wrote a few more, voila -- linked essay collection. (Can I over-emphasize how common this thinking is among essayists—and how often wrong-headed?) I tried to get that one published but eventually realized it had to be transformed into a more traditional memoir. (In a future post I’ll detail the essays-to-memoir process, so let’s skip ahead to April 2016, when I had a polished memoir manuscript.)

I am a fan of traditional independent and boutique literary presses and university presses, many of which accept non-agented submissions. I had already been compiling a spreadsheet of such publishers, organized first by those I most desired (because they’d published books I admired), and those that seemed most logical (given the book’s thematic elements). 

I noted any special submission calls, possible connection/recommendation, contests and open/closed submission periods, and finally, but not incidentally, any hunches I had. Next—because I so love a spreadsheet—I cross-referenced what each required initially, usually some combination of query letter, synopsis, proposal, sample chapters, the entire manuscript, marketing plan, author bio.

From April through January, I marched down my list, garnering both lightning-fast rejections as well as several requests for chapters, and a few for the whole manuscript. Result: slower rejections. Sure, some were personal, from editors who seemed genuinely to have read and thought carefully about the work.

Still, no is no.

Over those 10 months, I scratched some publishers off my list—they shuttered operations or their lists shrunk; some seemed less likely candidates after more careful study; sometimes I simply decided they wouldn’t want my book for some random reason which now seems silly. At the same time, the list grew as I discovered new-to-me publishers. What is it that we say about hope springing?

Along the way, I tinkered with the idea of seeking an agent—mostly because the advice of a book coach I’d consulted two years before, still resonated: there was nothing to lose and quite possibly something enormous to gain. About once a week, I spent time researching agents I might query—sometime. A small list emerged, tucked into another spreadsheet.

By the end of January, my energy was flagging, but I realized I had not made enough effort querying university presses. I had at least a dozen on my list I’d be thrilled to be published by. They all wanted a full proposal or some combination of the elements of a proposal, and while I’d written one, I kept tinkering, never sure it was right. Finally, I started sending it out.

By mid-February the full manuscript was under review at two boutique publishers, a more commercial press, and one university press. I’d gotten to this stage before—and then heard no. And sent out more queries, sample chapters, hopes.

That’s when I glanced out my window late one dark, cold Thursday afternoon, and noticed the snow. So much snow. A big storm coating New England to Virginia. Suddenly all the Facebook posts I’d seen from writers cancelling trips to theAWP (Association of Writers and Writing Programs) conference in Washington, D.C, made sense.

I hadn’t planned on going. But suddenly I had a thought: all those cancellations must mean the conference headquarters hotel would have a lot of available rooms. I was only a four-hour drive from D.C., and my four-wheel-drive SUV—and I, who once lived in Syracuse—could easily handle the lingering snow in the forecast.

By 5 a.m. the next morning, I was on the New Jersey Turnpike, heading south.

Typically, when I go to a conference, I have an agenda—connect with this editor, meet that publisher, make IRL friends with Facebook writer buddies, take notes at Famous Writer’s presentation, go to Other Famous Writer’s reading. Network. Pitch. Buy discounted journals. Get books signed. I’m usually exhausted even before I put on my nametag.

As I drove, I realized I had no plan—and that felt great. I had not studied the schedule, didn’t know who would be in the exhibit hall, who was reading where or when. My only agenda was to find friends, drop in at panels that seemed promising, maybe wander the book fair.

Ah, the book fair: a cavernous space (about three football fields?) where hundreds of tables beckoned, where friendly literary folks were promoting, selling, and giving away journals and books, touting other writing conferences, offering free trials of software, sharing the virtues of MFA programs, reading series, residencies.

I spent most of my book fair time happily meandering, spontaneously connecting in person with journal and anthology editors who’d published my work, finding new things to read, tossing swag into my tote.

At some point, I realized some publishers and university presses still on my list were there. I noticed that since I wasn’t in I-Must-Complete-My-Agenda mode, my usually nervous chatter disappeared. Instead of trying to sell myself, and by extension, my manuscript, I was only making new friends in the writing world.

Several asked me to send the manuscript when I got home. Others said it wasn’t right for them. Somehow, I had the same reaction to both outcomes: okay! I simply continued wending my may through the exhibit hall.

Finally, in the last 20 minutes of the final day, vendors were packing up their booths—and my tote was swelling because they were handing out free books so as not to incur return shipping costs. I noticed a man packing up, a welcoming smile on his face. We began chatting, about how much our feet hurt. About the conference. He asked something—I can’t remember what—and I began to tell him about my manuscript. In my mind, we were just having a conversation. Two tired writing world comrades at the end of an exhausting weekend.

At some point though, when I mentioned that the story takes place partly in New Jersey, and partly in Las Vegas, he pointed to the banner above his head: University of Nevada Press. Nevada, you know, home to Las Vegas.

Justin Race, director of UNV Press, introduced himself, and invited me to send him the first few chapters when I got home. He liked what he read, and asked for the full manuscript. By March 22, I had an offer. Two hours later, one of the other publishers who had the full manuscript phoned to make an offer too.

I realize that this part of the story makes it all sound so easy—bump into someone at a conference and the rest is publishing kismet. I assure you, nothing about bringing this memoir to that point was easy.

The thing is, I was ready. The manuscript had been revised and revised and polished. I’d researched and prepared query/submission materials. My spreadsheet tells the plodding, painstaking backstory of those 11 months (and before that, the submission process of the book’s previous incarnation).

What happens when you’ve been hearing no for a long time and in one afternoon, you hear yes—twice? After the elation, I mean? You get confused, that’s what. You wish you had an agent after all…

I’ll pick up from there in the next Memoir Book Report post, sharing how, over the next week, I found an agent, weighed offers, and said—yes!

Read the restof the Memoir Book Report series here.

Images: Snow-Flickr/CreativeCommons-JimThePhotographer. All others, royalty-free clip-art.

Memoir Cover: First Peek (Happy Birthday, Dad)

Today would have been my father’s 91^st birthday. What do you give a man who, in life, said he never needed anything? How about his photo on a book cover?

I’m pleased that today of all days, I can show you the cover of Starting with Goodbye: A Daughter’s Memoir of Love after Loss.

That’s Dad strolling along the edge, doing something he loved—walking and observing the world around him. He’s on Newport Beach in Southern California, a moment captured during a 1997 trip. Everyone else—my mother, husband, and child—was elsewhere, and he’d offered to stay with me on the beach, the only place I found comfort that summer: I was pregnant and fighting off all-day nausea, vertigo, and an odd aversion to air conditioning.

I was content to sit in the sand, relief washing in on every ocean breeze, and was not in a mood to talk. Dad was typically taciturn and, as usual, only able to sit for a few minutes before he began walking, back and forth along a quarter mile of beach—but always within eyesight. I remember his glancing back every few steps to check on me.

I’m biased of course, but I think the art department at University of Nevada Press did a terrific job. I love the cover for the way it treats light and balance, color and feeling. But I also love it for the way he is halfway-off-the-frame, and in a kind of slow motion; that captures something the story inside tries to tell—about the way he proffered protection, punctuated by our mutual tendency to always be moving near one another, but never fully.

Happy Birthday, Dad. Hope you like the gift.

Memoir Book Report -- Part IV: Title Roulette

This is the fourth in a series following my memoir as it moves from manuscript to published book. You can find the other installments here.

At a conference, I gave a short presentation, "I'll Take Titles for a Thousand, Alex," about creative titles for individual essays, short memoir pieces mostly, or chapters/essays in a book of creative nonfiction. I enjoy writing titles, though I'm aware many writers would willingly shred and rewrite dozens of pages rather than deal with titles. (We each are odd in our own ways!) I purposely limited my talk to short works, because except for making suggestions for the titles of a few clients' books, that's where my expertise lay.

But now I have one notch in the book title bedpost.

My memoir—to be published in May 2018 by University of Nevada Press—has a title: 

Starting with Goodbye: A Daughter's Memoir of Love after Loss

Phew. That only took three months, a hivemind of writer friends, the pros at the publisher, my agent, and hours of my time, buckets of anxiety-induced sweat, and way too many lists scrawled on a dozen or so yellow legal sheets. 

Here's how we got to the very best title for this book.

First, following my own advice, I always have a working title for anything I’m writing. So I had one, right from the beginning. Sort of. But it's hard to say, because when did the book begin? With the first pages I wrote about what happened to me after my father's death? That essay was titled "Two Weeks in Vegas,” and told the story of the time I spent in Las Vegas with my mother, beginning the morning after Dad died. But I didn't know then that piece would lead to a book. So that wasn't the first working title for the manuscript.

Six years later, with a dozen or so additional essays in hand, I began to think it might be a book of linked essays, and I typed this working title on page one: Father Figure. I soon realized this wasn't right, perhaps implying he wasn't a real father, or that it was about someone else.

Meanwhile, woven into the evolution of the title is the larger evolution of the book itself. As a memoir-in-linked-essays, I got great feedback on the writing, but a handful of publishers, a book coach, and trusted beta readers (writer friends) all said: transform the essays into a more traditional narrative memoir. I grumbled, procrastinated, and then finally I did it. (More on this process in a future Memoir Book Report post.)

As I rewrote and began to see the narrative arc emerging, I tossed out the working title. And another. When the new manuscript was ready, I began brainstorming title ideas, and landed on yet another working title, The Father and Daughter Reunion.

Right away, I knew I needed a subtitle—common in memoir not only to lure readers, but to give readers, booksellers, librarians, and others in the book world important hints about the story.

Back to the lists, where three word groups jumped out: "a love story," "a ghost story," and "a loss story." Because my father and I have "conversations" after his death, and because I came to know and love him better then too, I wanted to incorporate these ideas. And so I came up with the subtitle Every Loss Story is a Love Story.

Many people liked this subtitle (and even suggested it as a title) because it was lyrical, slightly mysterious, with nice rhythm. It sounded familiar but also new and surprising. But there were two problems: First, it too closely echoed the title of D. T. Max's biography of David Foster Wallace: "Every Ghost Story is a Love Story,” a book I’d read with great interest. Though it’s a phrase Wallace used, it didn't originate with him (which Max detailed in a New Yorker article), many readers would link it to Wallace.

The other problem was that, taken literally, that subtitle wouldn’t resonate for readers who have had different experiences with the connection between loss and love. I knew I’d be changing it, eventually.

Yet, coupled with The Father and Daughter Reunion, that was the subtitle when the University of Nevada Press acquired the book in March of this year. Early editorial feedback mirrored my own gut feeling: we needed a new title. I was ready. Sort of.

First, I went looking for inspiration inside the manuscript, searching phrases, themes, objects, chapter titles, dialogue. Next, I looked at poems about grief. I wrote and wrote titles and subtitles, filling pages. Then I culled the lists, spent time on Amazon checking for books with too-similar titles, and on Google, checking for...well you never know what, do you?

I reached out to trusted writer friends, some who’ve published memoirs, some who hadn’t; all whip-smart and able to consider both marketing issues and literary concerns. I added friends who buy books by the boatload. And my family.

I gave them—as well as my agent—14 possible titles, and 11 potential subtitles—disconnected from one another, in random order. I wanted to see what titles they thought matched which subtitles. I also asked for original ideas, and had lots of fun—and pulled out a bunch of hair—sorting through the responses.

At the same time, the publishers’ editorial and marketing teams were shuffling possibilities too. While I was fretting and spinning, my agent—who can instantly clarify for me things I’m naturally inclined to make overly complicated—helped me see the value in considering not only the lyrical, literary, dreamy, poetic titles I tend to gravitate to, but also more straightforward options. This was good advice. The lists grew. And narrowed.

Finally, a deadline loomed, and I sent off my suggestions to the publisher—ten possible titles and seven subtitle candidates. Then I waited. And kept replaying the list in my head, questioning everything I had and had not considered, admonishing myself for not including more of the titles still on those yellow sheets. A few days later my email pinged with my final title. And I relaxed.

Right away, Starting with Goodbye: A Daughter’s Memoir of Love after Loss, felt right. It struck me, my agent, my family and friends, as intuitively on-target.

Right away, I started coaxing my fingers around the new keyboard combination, wanting to immediately get quicker at typing it, wanting to feel it flow from my fingertips, as if I’d been typing it forever.

And now I can’t imagine having anything else on the book cover. Speaking of covers…I got a glimpse of the art last week. But that’s another blog post.

Find the rest of the Memoir Book Reports here. If you're interested in seeing the slides that accompanied my presentation about titles for short works (at the HippoCamp conference), go here.

Memoir Book Report: Part II -- Final Manuscript Revisions

This is the second in a series, following my memoir manuscript from contract to published book.

Late May and most of June were dedicated to final revisions. I happen to love revision; that precious second (third, two-hundredth!) chance to work on precision, so the reader will understand what I'm trying to say, describe, recreate. Making sure I do, too. And, in the process, often discovering new, perhaps tiny but crucial points.

As I mentioned in the first installment, the best part about making those revisions was being deeply immersed in the world of the book for weeks. This allowed me to be more curious about things I'd already written. Now, I could think more about those events that helped shape the narrative and ask myself additional questions. Was there anything new to learn, to weave in?

The memoir's main story is about my reconnecting to my father after his death, while I was in the middle of marriage, motherhood, and an MFA. Several important flashbacks and backstories though also come into play, helping a reader understand how Dad and I once interacted earlier and the particular world we occupied.

The memoir writer works hard to recreate that vanished world. I'd thought I'd done that—and where I'd struggled, my earlier beta readers had pointed out where more work was needed, and I'd attended to it months before. And yet, coming back to the manuscript again, I saw places where that world wasn't quite as clear as it could be. The revision recommendation notes from my publisher highlighted a few areas I thought were done, done, done.

At first, reading some of those revision recommendations, I had a sense of "Nah, don't think so." But when I let the ideas settle in my head for a few days, I realized it wasn't about anything being "wrong" with the manuscript. Instead, these were opportunities for better clarity and richer storytelling.

For example, I was urged to write more scenes about our family's first class travels when I was a child and teen, as my father's income rose; to introduce and develop the character of my childhood BFF earlier in the text (she frequently traveled with us and still figures in the story 40 years later when Dad dies); and to expand the material about my life in the competitive world of horse shows (which my father financed).

As I re-read and re-read the manuscript—three times through, with pencil, sticky notes, and highlighter in hand—I saw where there were still openings and that filling them would only enhance and deepen the story, more effectively inviting in readers who'd otherwise have no means to visualize certain events and understand their emotional significance.

Then, I began addressing each of the revision recommendations I had agreed to. (A few, I had successfully argued against.) Some of this involved excavating original draft pages from the files, locating notes I knew I once made but didn't use the first time around, to get at the needed information (hence, the many piles and sticky notes all over my desk, above).

First, I "fixed" easy things—deleting bits of repetitious material; fleshing out a secondary character; clearing up one chapter's confusing timeline; smoothing a few tense shifts; moving a couple of passages into places that made more intuitive sense.

Next, I concentrated on writing new material. A vintage postcard triggered a flashback about the Las Vegas hotels we stayed at long before my parents built their dream home and retired there. Paring a section about my father's smoking led to a new passage about how I once smoked to mask feeling like an outsider in the rarified air of horse shows populated by heiresses.

When I set out one morning to write a scene from our family's grand European tour when I was a nine-year-old, what emerged were a few sweet and loving exchanges between me and my father I hadn't thought of including—and which became the new prologue.

As I wrote more about my BFF, I asked her over for coffee, so she could read some new material—and as we talked, I learned something I wasn't expecting, and that information helped me round out an altogether different paragraph that had been bugging me. I asked my sister to read some pages and fill in small details of family history that perked up a few sentences. I worked through with my husband a chapter that peeks behind the curtain of some private marriage and in-law moments.

Doing all that and seeing how much it improved the manuscript gave me the emotional fortitude to take a long, second look at how I'd written of my relationship with an often prickly family member with whom I was often at odds. In a sense, I took myself back to Memoir Writing 101: Don't Be a Victim on The Page. I had to ask myself how much of this other person's behavior and its effect on me was, in some respects, about me, not them.

Along the way, I noticed how several things could be improved with a simple red line—a big X through sentences, paragraphs. Some became irrelevant in light of new, better material. Some became redundant as other areas grew in depth from revision. Though I preach it often, I was reminded yet again that DELETE is not only an option, it's often a friend.

Once I felt the revised manuscript was in top form, I asked my husband and elder son to read it in full, for the first time. They each had a few good suggestions that made their way into (or out of) the book.

Finally, I proofread. And proofread again. Prepared the manuscript in the exact format the publisher requested. Held my breath, and hit SEND.

Days later, I found a typo. I marked it on my hard copy, which I'd printed on pale purple paper. Just because. I didn't panic because I'd learned well already: writing is solitary, but publishing a book is purely collaborative. I'm looking forward to working with my copy editor.

Onward.

Image of X - Flickr/CreativeCommons-KarynChristner