A gratuitously long year in review

Wow. It’s almost 2008. I’ll finally be able to tell people that “my book will be out next year.” That doesn’t seem so long in the big scheme of things. But to a lot of casual acquaintances, the time it takes for a book to be published seems epic. And my modicum of success seems sudden.

The truth is, it’s been a methodical step-by-step process. Lots of hoping. Lots of dreaming. Lots of plotting and planning. And of course, lots of writing. Here’s how the whole thing began, not counting the previous ten years of fumbling around.

10/05/05 I began writing RABBIT YEARS (originally titled SUREFIRE). This was it. My big attempt to finish a novel, after many false starts.

11/23/05 Set up trial a account at Squarespace (www.jamieford.com). I figured I’d nab my own URL before some other Jamie Ford does. Several have contacted me since. I’m doing my best to represent all the Jamie Fords out there.

1/10/06 Finished RABBIT YEARS. It weighed in at 345 sloppily-written pages, but it was done. I didn’t even let it breathe before I began the 2nd draft.

3/10/06 Began submitting flash fiction to Flashing in the Gutters and Fictional Musings. This marked the first time since high school that I’d shared my writing with anyone.

3/21/06 Gin Petty saw my fiction online and and encouraged me to apply to some of the major literary workshops––Breadloaf, Sewanee and Squaw. Gin’s husband is Jim Tomlinson, an Iowa Fiction Award Winner.

4/10/06 Accepted to Orson Scott Card’s Literary Bootcamp in Buena Vista, Virginia.

4/28/06 Found out that I had won Jason Evan’s Clarity of Night Fiction Contest. (Thanks again Jason!)

5/20/06 Asked by Mark Pettus if I’d be interested in submitting something to his new literary journal, The Picolata Review.

5/22/06 Called in sick and wrote a 1,200-word short story entitled I AM CHINESE about a Chinese boy sent to an all-white private school.

6/7/06 Sent out a pair of email queries for RABBIT YEARS to agents and had an immediate request for a 30-page partial.

6/7/06 Accepted to the Squaw Valley Writers Conference, based off of a partial of RABBIT YEARS.

6/12/06 Went to OSC’s Bootcamp where Scott Card turned me on to the idea of a noble romantic tragedy. I bunkered down and wrote THE BUTTON, a 4,000-word short story about a Chinese boy caught up in the hysteria of the Japanese Internment during WWII.

6/23/06 I AM CHINESE accepted by The Picolata Review

6/25/06 RABBIT YEARS rejected.

7/1/06 Began 3rd rewrite of RABBIT YEARS. Realizing that it’s suffering a “death of a thousand edits”.

7/14/06 Began querying again.

8/5/06 Arrived at Squaw Valley. I was supposed to workshop RABBIT YEARS but switched to a 6,000-word version of THE BUTTON––went back and used the title, "I AM CHINESE". (Confused yet?)

8/20/06 Subbed new version of I AM CHINESE to Glimmer Train.

8/24/06 After a ton of positive feedback at Squaw, I put RABBIT YEARS into a medically induced coma and began writing HOTEL.

9/29/06 Flew to Seattle. Visited the Panama Hotel, the Wing Luke Museum and met with historian Doug Chin to confirm my research.

12/11/06 Finished HOTEL.

12/14/06 Read part of HOTEL at local Open Mic Night.

12/29/06 Found out I AM CHINESE was a Glimmer Train finalist.

2/24/07 Began editing HOTEL.

3/26/07 Sent two snail mail queries to agents w/67-page partial.

4/19/07 Had the first request for the full manuscript.

4/23/07 Began querying the world via email. Requests for partials and full manuscripts start coming in that afternoon.

5/2/07 Joined Publishers Marketplace so I could research agents.

5/3/07 Got “the call.”

5/5/07 Again…

5/8/07 And again…and again…

5/8/07 Got “the call” from Kristin Nelson, who also forwarded her standard agency agreement.

5/9/07 Kristin mentioned Backspace, which I later joined.

5/10/07 Began checking references, contacting clients of prospective agents. Everyone loved his or her agents, which made choosing even harder.

5/17/07 Signed with Kristin Nelson.

7/1/07 Finished edits suggested by Kristin.

7/3/07 Began contacting writer friends and colleagues for blurbs to use on submission.

7/9/07 Changed title from THE PANAMA HOTEL to HOTEL ON THE CORNER OF BITTER AND SWEET.

7/17/07 Decided to submit to editors during the summer rather than wait until September.

7/18/07 Officially on submission.

7/19/07 First rejection.

7/19/07 First offer.

7/25/07 Looks like we’re going to auction.

7/26/07 Conference calls with editors.

7/27/07 More calls.

8/1/07 Auction begins.

8/2/07 Auction ends.

8/9/07 Back to Seattle for press photos with Lawrence Kim.

9/6/07 Deal announced in Publishers Weekly.

10/18/07 Began looking for historical photos to use and rights for an epigraph by Duke Ellington.

10/23/07 Did my first radio interview on a local NPR affiliate.

11/14/07 Final Contract signed. The UPS man brings me my first check––I resist the urge to hug him on my doorstep. I settle for awkward, white-guy dancing around my living room.

11/15/07 Final Manuscript delivered to Random House.

12/1/07 Set up an S-corp under than name Bittersweet Productions to avoid paying too much in taxes to The Man.

12/8/07 Now 70 pages into book #2, currently untitled.

12/22/07 Clean-up edits begin on HOTEL, which I’m finishing this week…speaking of which, I gotta go, duty calls…

Happy New Year everyone!

Lucky numbers

There’s a great scene in the movie Dumb & Dumber where Lauren Holly’s character tells Jim Carrey she’d only go out with him if he were the last guy on the planet.

And his response is, ”So…there’s a chance!”

That was what I thought of when I checked my agent’s blog this morning. Kristin posted her numbers for the year, which were downright humbling.

I knew she and Sara received about 20,000 queries from prospective authors each year. But with Ms. Snark’s retirement, Kristin’s PubRants has taken over as the most widely-read agent blog out there. That extra readership is probably what’s helped push her queries to over 30,000 this year––that’s 500+ queries a week.

Of those 30,000 queries, she requested 74 full manuscripts. Of those, she signed eight new clients. Eight. The few, the proud, the soon to be published.

So congrats to Brook Taylor, Sarah Rees Brennan, Helen Stringer and Kristin’s other new authors. It’s humbling to be one of the chosen few––the eight.

Did I mention that eight is a lucky number in Chinese? I know this because my grandmother, Yin Yin, never let me forget it. She was thrilled that I was born 8 pounds, 8 ounces. The number “88” can also mean double joy––or double the labor pain, as I’m sure my mom would have said.

How significant is the number eight? So much that a man in Chengdu, China paid $270,000 for the telephone number 8888-8888. And he still gets those annoying feng shui telemarketers, go figure. Even the Summer Olympics in Beijing are scheduled to open on 8/8/08 at 8:08:08 p.m.

And for the record, my favorite Karaoke bar is a place in Hawaii called 8 Fat Fat 8.

Just sayin'.

And the dead shall write again

In September, author Robert Jordan passed away. Not only was it sad because Jordan was relatively young at 58, but because his Wheel of Time series was left without its capstone––his 12th and final book in the series was left…unfinished.

Fortunately, his widow chose a fine author in Brandon Sanderson to do the honor of finishing the last book––which is slated for 2009 and will come out with due fanfare. Having Sanderson give necessary closure to a much-heralded series just feels like the right thing to do, for the right reasons.

But what about those other books?

You know, the ones written by authors long since dead, but whose brands are very much alive. The one that immediately springs to life is gothic horror writer V.C. Andrews who penned Flowers in the Attic. Her books were so popular that after she passed away, her estate hired Andrew Neiderman, to ghostwrite subsequent books. (Pause for ironic reflection). There are now, what, 20-30 books written by Neiderman?––far more than Virginia C. Andrews ever produced in real life. She died in 1986, but the brand marches on.

And now we have Eric Van Lustbader continuing Robert Ludlum’s “Bourne” series. At least Lustbader’s name is on the cover. But he was a success in his own right, so maybe this is a marketing situation where 1+1=3 as far as magnifying the brand.

But is the Lustbader & Ludlum lovechild just a truth-in-labeling version of the JAMES PATTERSON books. You know, the ones written in collaboration with Howard Roughan, Andrew Gross, Peter De Jonge, Michael Ledwidge, and Gabrielle Charbonnet?

I’m not saying they’re bad books. I mean, c’mon, the guy is like the McDonald’s of publishing––130 million books sold. Eight books adapted for the screen. He’s a brand that’s filling a serious void out there––a brand that is satisfying a need. Oh, and do you want fries with that?

So what’s next? It seems like fifty years ago, successful authors were benign pop-culture icons. Now they’re living, breathing brand-marketing opportunities and in the future, will their estates, their heirs and most of all—their publishers, be able to let the machine grind to a halt?

What happens when Stephen King leaves this world for the next? Or a juggernaut like J.K. Rowling? Would it matter to her younger fans if ghostwritten books kept coming each year, just in time for Christmas?

Facebook vs. MySpace

I made my first foray into the online world back in 1983. I was fifteen. I had a Commodore VIC-20, the Edsel of all personal computers. Fortunately my friend Kevin was blessed with a TI-99, complete with an old-school coupler modem. The kind where you put the whole phone receiver into the rubber thingy. (A legion of MIT-engineers couldn’t figure out that it was easier to plug in the phone cord…)

The TI-99 was a great computer. The TI stood for Texas Instruments, those nice people that brought you early LED calculators that practically ran on Sears DieHard batteries. I remember parents shelling out $79 for these behemoths while their kids used them to spell dirty words. 7734 spells Hell, if you hold it upside down, that kind of thing.

The problem with the online world in 1983 was that we didn’t know where it was? That modem sat idle for a year until we found a “phone book” of data lines. The lines ranged from government agencies to regional BBSs. (Bulletin Board Systems). But by far (we’re talking 80%) most of the numbers were for shady “networking” services. By networking, I mean hooking up in the analog sense.

And things haven't changed that much 20+ years later.

I blogged about MySpace last week. Sure, I love the whole social networking thing, but I hate the spam. I hate the cheesy singles ads. Though there are some really nice author pages, like this one for Barry Eisler.

Then my blog buddy, Lisa, mentioned Facebook––and after relentless prodding from other friends, I finally joined. And you know what? It’s soooooo much nicer than MySpace. Though I do miss Bambi, Mystique, Destiny, Asia and Brighton...

Facebook vs. MySpace. Do you have a preference?