I’ve been writing a fantasy series for Young Adult/NewAdult readers for several years.  What a long strange trip it’s been to date.

Making the switch from playwriting to prose was easy…or so I thought.  When I write a play, I overwrite the hell out of it.  It’s so much easier to prune than it is to encourage growth from soil that may well be fallow.  And so, I overwrote the hell out of the first book in my series, The Seven Tears.

When I finally – and tearfully – typed “The End” and instructed Word to provide me with a word count, I literally screamed.  I knew it was a behemoth, but I had no idea that I had created a beast nearing 165K words.

And so the pruning began.  This is where playwriting and fiction writing go their separate ways.  Cutting a script down to fighting weight is fun, and generally easy.  It’s like the puzzle app that you love to play but don’t tell anyone about because it was designed for kids.  You just clear the extraneous dialogue and make a clear road for the story.  Sooner or later, Bam!  90 pages.  Still more work, but polishing is fun, too.

But a 165k word long YA fantasy?

For comparison’s sake, Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince weighs in at nearly 169K words.  Imagine the work that JK and her editors had to do to get it down to a mere 169k words!

But here’s the deal:  first time authors, like me, don’t get the luxury of presenting huge books to agents/publishers.  When JK was an unknown, random Scottish woman hawking her hand-scribbled story of a young wizard, she was allowed 77K words for Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone.  The next installment in Harry’s story was allowed another 10K words or so, and then the money came in and JK’s gloves came off.  Order of the Phoenix is over 250k words.

So we earn our word count with sales.  Cool…cool.

The story of The Seven Tears took me 165K words to tell.  Figuring out how to legitimately tell my story without sacrificing character development, plot elements, or darlings that I’m simply unwilling to kill, has been a bitch.  I’ve gone to writing conferences, talked to agents, editors, and manuscript “evaluators.”  I’ve forced friends and family to read it.  I’m a member of a great writer’s community, The Hudson Writers Group, who have listened to me read huge swathes of it.  I’ve begged teacher friends to ask their age-appropriate students to read it.

And…I’ve spent a LOT of time just staring at page 1 of the ms. on my computer.

Since I really want my story to go out into the world and find a life of its own, I listened to all the advice I’ve received, rolled up my sleeves and killed my darlings.  The Seven Tears now weighs in at a somewhat more appropriate 124K words.  It’s as sleek as I can make it.

This process is exhausting and emotionally draining for every writer, no matter which rung of the ladder you occupy.  But for first timers, the next step is to seek representation, or find an indie publisher who will consider an un-agented submission.

Which brings us to: THE QUERY LETTER.

In a single page, you are instructed to entice and amaze.  You’ve got to generate excitement, dazzle, and dare the reader (some poor intern) not to request the first chapter.  You’ve got to make yourself sound like a potential rockstar with more social media savvy than Yvette Nicole Brown.  Worst of all, in a couple of lines, you have to present your yarn in an easy to swallow capsule.  

I have several query letters that I’ve sweated over creating for The Seven Tears.  They all pretty much suck, as I imagine most do.

You can take entire courses on writing the “perfect” query letter.  There are literally thousands of people on-line who will help, for a price, of course.  As the storyteller, however, I feel that it’s a little above my pay grade to jump right in and slap the query letter reader in the face on Monday with a perfectly branded…thing, that can be turned right around and appear on every Kindle by Thursday.  That kind of manufactured excitement is beyond me because I’m still in the process.  I’m 45K words into the sequel.

What I do have to say is pretty simple:

Dear Poor, Undervalued Intern:

Here’s the deal, I’ve written a lot of plays that have done pretty well for themselves and for me.  I’ve turned my storytelling talents to a genre I love: YA Fantasy, and have created an incredibly cool series that will be loved by young women, 15-25 (and probably older) who love the work of Cassandra Clare, Sarah J. Maas, and Leigh Bardugo.

 

My heroine is snarky and smart, my heroes are dark and light, and the world I’ve built is huge and wondrous.  I’d be ever so pleased if you’d consider taking a look at my first chapter.

Sincerely,

Me

PS:  Yes, I’m on Twitter.  Yes, I blog.  Yes, I understand the hellacious amount of on the ground work that will be expected of me, should someone somewhere say, “Yes!”

PPS:  IT’S NOT A FUCKING MERMAID STORY.

Literally every response I’ve gotten to date has said: “Love your writing, but we’re not looking for a mermaid story right now.”  The Seven Tears has ZERO mermaids.  I’ve gone over my query letters in a forensic frenzy, and cannot for the life of me see why anyone’s takeaway would be, “mermaid story.”

So to all writers out there who are struggling to navigate through these waters, I salute you.  Now, go back to work!  Whether it knows it or not, the world needs storytellers now more than ever.

As for me, I’m off to attend a meeting of the Hudson Writers Group, where they know the difference between Finfolk and mermaids.  Mermaids have TAILS, for chrissakes!