Critique my query!

I'm participating in another one of Heather Webb's fabulous contests (more here), and this time it's all about crafting a great query letter! Whether you're participating in the contest or not, feel free to give it a read and let me know what you think...

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After 18-year-old Anne Marie is shipped off to Paris to live with her grandmother, she plans to uncover the secrets surrounding her mother’s death. In her pursuit of the truth, she stumbles across the diary of Charlotte Corday, a French aristocrat entrenched in the politics of the French Revolution and someone Anne's mother once considered a hero.

Strange things start happening with the diary, causing Anne to time travel and become Charlotte, a seemingly calm and unpretentious woman who is known in history for having murdered Jean-Paul Marat.

Her two realities become increasingly intertwined. As Anne, her new friend Pierre tries to bring her in touch with her mother's past, while dealing with his own troubles that revolve around the riots ravaging Paris in November 2005. As Charlotte, Anne struggles in deciding whether or not to follow through with what Charlotte considered her destiny--killing one man to save 100,000--or to follow her own path.

THROUGH CHARLOTTE'S EYES is a 78,000 word YA historical fiction novel. I wrote a version of this story for my Masters thesis at The University of Chicago, where I also received an Honorable Mention in the 2007 Emerging Writers Series for Fiction. It should appeal to fans of Jennifer Donnelly's REVOLUTION and Laurie Halse Anderson's FEVER 1793.

Thank you for your consideration.

Sincerely,

Elizabeth SanFilippo

Critique my pitch for 'Through Charlotte's Eyes'

I'm taking part in Heather Webb's super awesome pitch-ilicious blog hop contest. Read more about it here.

I'll let the pitch speak for itself... (but just add this is for my 80,000 word YA historical, Through Charlotte's Eyes).

Critique away!

When 18-year-old Anne Marie is shipped off to Paris to live with her grandmother, she tries to sort out the lies about her mother's death that have been propagated by a cold grandmother and a distant father. In her pursuit of the truth, she tumbles – literally – into the life of a distant relative, Charlotte Corday, who her mother once considered a hero. With her two realities becoming increasingly intertwined, Anne must decide whether or not to follow Charlotte’s destiny: to kill one man to save 100,000.

On revisions

I'm in the midst of a set of revisions before sending the novel off to beta readers, and every time I revise, it surprises me just how much time it takes. Really, it shouldn't be surprising. At this point in the game, it's all about cutting out the things that just don't add to the story, and making sure every single last word counts... and that can take a boat load of thinking and time.

That said, it still amazes me what this novel has become. A bit of background: I wrote a draft of Through Charlotte's Eyes in grad school... officially four years now. But the draft was just... okay. Something was missing, some verve, some tension, and so I took a break for a couple years, worked on some other writing pursuits, started my freelance career, tried some new things, got engaged, changed jobs, got married.

Early last year, through the madness that is life, I dove back in. I rewrote my outline, cut it into pieces, and rearranged it again. I deleted entire scenes, entire diary entries, added characters, added more historical context (as long as it pertained to the story)...

When I finished my latest draft just days before the end of 2011, I breathed a big sigh of relief. I finally felt closer to the finish line. But really, in the scheme of things, it's just one step closer. The novel now tells the story I once couldn't grasp. There's something there, a story that I can't wait to share.

But, for now, I'm still trimming words. Staring at the computer screen, asking myself, is this the best way to show this? I like this stage in the process, even if it is a lot of work. And with each revision, each time I highlight a word, hit delete and make a better choice, I'm one step closer.

And what do I keep in mind through this writing process? A quote, because, if you know me, you know I love inspirational quotes.

So, for everyone in the throes of writing and/or revision, just remember:
"Don't tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass."

A Look Back at 2011

To say 2011 was a busy year would be an understatement (and 2012 too, considering its already halfway through January!) But just because it was busy doesn't mean 2011 wasn't fabulous.

In May, I landed my dream job (other than my aspiring career as a novelist of course) at a culinary vacation company called The International Kitchen.

In September, I traveled up to my favorite U.S. city, Traverse City, to marry my favorite person ever.

In October, our family grew when we brought home a lil English bull dog puppy, who we named Kafka.

And then on December 29th, I finished the latest draft of my novel, Through Charlotte's Eyes. It hadn't been a 2011 resolution of mine, but it did feel amazing to finally get the novel written the way I wanted to, from start to finish. That's not to say it's done, but I am in the polishing stages, fact-checking, and all that. I'm almost ready for a beta read (contact me if you're interested!)

So, 2011? Pretty dang awesome.

When you read a novel similar to yours...

Tomorrow, I'm meeting my writing/critique partner for a Write-Your-A$$-Off Day! Okay, so it's not a full glorious day of clicking away at the keyboard on our novels, but my writing and critique partner and I are meeting up tomorrow night for the first time in awhile, and we fully intend to write and edit for a few hours. In fact, it was just about a year ago that we did our first write-your-a$$-off day, to much success.

These sorts of days are becoming more and more valuable to me. Rarely do I get long hours in one sitting to just work on my novel. (You learn to do a page here, a page there).

But that's beside the point. Rather, I've been thinking about how I think about my novel when I'm not really working on my novel. The characters follow me wherever I go. I see a girl on the el that embodies Anne-Marie much more than I ever even pictured. An article I stumble across mentions Charlotte Corday. Or I read a book that makes me think about my own... which recently happened. I'd been told that my novel is similar to Jennifer Donnelly's best-seller Revolution. In ways this worried me. What if it was too similar? What if my novel is seen as a copy-cat, even though this story has been bouncing around my head and my computer for years?

I laid all those fears to rest when I read it. There's definitely a lot of similar elements. Both lead characters get sent to Paris. Both girls have some demons in their life. Both struggle to find common ground with their dad. Both suddenly find themselves immersed in a diary and the French Revolution. Both time travel.

Okay, okay, that's a lot a like one another, but content wise? Not so much. Revolution is this wonderful tribute to the power of music and the unraveling of a French Revolution mystery. Through Charlotte's Eyes is about destiny, connections through time, and whether one murderous act can change the future. My novel is, in large part, about Charlotte Corday, but it's just as much about how Charlotte's actions affected the world--and one particular girl--years later.

It's in the differences as well as the similarities between the two novels that I learn a bit about where I want to see my close-to-final draft go from here. There's scenes where I need more French Revolution details. There's interactions between the past and the present that can be better fleshed out, like they are in Revolution.

But does this mean Revolution informs the way I write my own novel? Not necessarily. But it's inspiring to read something that takes a similar elements and goes in an entirely different direction.

And when it comes down to it? It's all about the story you have to tell. That's what I'll be working on tomorrow at Starbucks, making that story hit the perfect pitch by getting all of the details just right. It's my story to tell--but then again, it also belongs to Charlotte Corday. And that, my friends, is something Revolution knows nothing about.

Page-A-Day Calendar

Here I'll keep track of all my progress over the next month on the page-a-day challenge . Goal: Write 1 page (equivalent to ~500 words) each day on my WIP. Thanks Weronika for organizing this!

UPDATE: Out of curiosity, as of 5/24, I'm also keeping track of how many words I'm writing for other writing projects - i.e. hot dogs and Gather/entertainment!

5/16: 584 words
5/17: 0! yikes
5/18: 588 words
5/19: 618 words
5/20: 0 on novel, but 1,000ish on Gather articles. That counts... right? =0
5/21: 695 words
5/22: 0
5/23: 581 words
5/24: 786 words on WIP; 310 words on hot dogs; 494 on Gather (to be posted next week) - Good day for words!
5/25: 0 on WIP; 327 words on hot dogs (article goes up soon); 1485 words across four Gather articles
5/26: 517 on WIP; 199 on hot dogs; 450 on Gather
5/27: 0 on WIP; 598 on Gather; 213 on food blog
5/28: 0 on WIP; 173 on Gather
5/29: 0 on WIP; 254 on Gather
5/30: 0 on WIP; 366 on Gather
5/31: 0 on everything. =(
6/1: 401 on WIP; 487 on Gather
6/2: about -300 since I edited my WIP tonight; 244 on Gather; 355 on hot dogs
6/3: 596 words on WIP
6/4: 0 on WIP; 407 on Gather
6/5: 0 all around - I spent the day with one of my best friends on her wedding day! =)
6/6: 931 words on Gather
6/7: 243 on Gather; 383 on hot dogs
6/8: 1427 on Gather ... clearly I need to learn to balance my time more between projects

Page-A-Day Challenge began... yesterday!

Well, I'm already behind. I signed up to take part in the Page-A-Day Challenge, started by the inspiring Weronika Janczuk, and I'm already a day behind! The Challenge started yesterday with the purpose of keeping us working on our novels by just writing one page a day for the next month. We don't have to write any more--if we don't feel like it--but we have to strive for not writing anything less.

I have a reason for not starting yesterday--namely, the fact that I was home in my apartment for no more than an hour all day yesterday (and didn't get home til 12:30 last night)--but I'm not going to focus on yesterday. I'm going to focus on keeping this going, and writing every day from now on through the next month--and hopefully beyond.

While I've been writing more than ever--well, since grad school anyways--most of my writing has been for Gather lately. By having this page-a-day goal, I'll also keep myself focused on my novel, too.

To keep myself accountable, I'll continue to update the calendar located here with what I've written. (Since I use Liquid Story Binder to write, I'll actually just keep track of word count, rather than pages, under the understanding that one page is about 500 pages.) As Weronika suggest, I'll tweet it, too!

To see who else is committing this page-a-day challenge, check out Weronika's blog here.

Write-Your-A$$-off Day, Chicago-style, success!

Yesterday, I met up with my writing pal over at a local coffee/lunch spot with one goal in mind: sit down and work on my WIP, Through Charlotte's Eyes. Dear friends, if you're having trouble making progress in your WIP, I highly recommend finding a spot to spend most of your day to write. All in all, the 5-hour write-a-thon was a smashing success!

I finished rewriting Chapter 17 completely; added an entirely new (and lengthy) section, Chapter 18--which I'd been looking forward to writing ever since getting back from Paris weeks ago; and then started in on another new chapter. Approximately 5,000 words written/added if Liquid Story Binder is to believed.

On that note, too: Liquid Story Binder = awesome. I used the typewriter feature for most of the 5-hour writing time, meaning I couldn't go back and question what I wrote. It forced me to keep writing and keep pushing forward, which is exactly what I needed yesterday to be about.

I expect to have more of these write-your-a$$-off days in the near future. Days like those remind me why I write and what I'm working toward: not just a finished, polished novel but also making writing a full-time job.

Fellow bloggers and friends, do you write in long sessions, or short bursts? How do you keep your fingers clicking against the keyboard in order to make progress on your latest work-in-progress novel?

WIP Wednesday #7

Well, I haven't posted one of these in awhile. Hmm, since July 2009 to be precise. Oops. But I swear, I'm here! And I'm still spending a crazy amount of time behind my computer screen.

If I'm not working on the novel--which continues to progress, no matter how slowly--it's writing about hot dogs, or writing entertainment articles/reviews on Gather, or brainstorming new novels (yes, yes, I know, I should be focused on getting the first novel done first--but sometimes, I just can't help myself). Then there's also attempting to keep up with everyone else's lovely blogs, and keeping up on Twitter/Facebook... and then, you know, working a full-time job and somehow also having a social life away from the computer.

All of this begs the question, when is too much... too much? Probably when you don't enjoy it.

Luckily, I'm still enjoying all of it. So, here's me, still sitting behind my computer, writing. (No one really believed me when I posted on Facebook that I was giving up on my novel on April Fool's Day).

After the amazing Paris trip, I've been overcome with so many ideas for the novel, important details that I need to include in my WIP, Through Charlotte's Eyes. I can finally really envision it whole, and that's such a driving force for me to finish this novel within the year.

But along with all these details are keeping track of my timeline that moves back in forth between 2005 and 1792-3, making sure I'm not repeating things I mentioned in Chapter 2 again in Chapter 17 that don't bear repeating, and so forth. Two weeks ago, I spent at least a half hour trying to track down something I had already written that affected what happened in a later chapter... I thought, there has to be better way to go about this. There has to be a way to be better organized. And voila! I thought of Scrivener, but, alas, that's only for Mac users. But the creators of the word processing program for writers recommended some other programs for Windows, luckily.

Thanks to those recommendations, I've been using Liquid Story Binder for the past two weeks and I'm finding it so much easier to get organized, so I don't spend wasted time tracking down things that I worked on weeks ago. Phew! (Anyone else using LSB? Or another similar program? How are you liking it?)

Things are moving smoothly now. I WILL finish this draft, I WILL get it edited, I WILL get it out to beta readers, and I WILL finish this novel by year's end. To keep pushing forward, my writing pal and I are organizing our own Write-your-A$$-off day for the end of the month. And I can't wait... writing a little bit here, a little bit there on the novel, never feels like enough. April 25th can't get here soon enough!

What I'm Up To

Writing on this blog seems to be inversely proportional to writing my novel as of late. I'm working on balancing this out some - as a goal mind you, not as a New Year's Resolution that I'm not good at keeping. I've got a lot on my plate lately, though, it seems. Between working more hours at my day job; working on my novel, hot dog articles, and other food pieces, as well as trying to keep some semblance of a social life, it's a difficult juggling act.

That said, I'm making some great progress on my novel. I'm still about 1/4 through the rewrite (which is what I told my twitter followers a couple weeks ago), but that's only because a week ago, I realized that some of my timeline didn't land right. I moved an important scene earlier, and that changed the build-up to it. Earlier this week, I finished those tweaks and I now feel that I can continuing pushing ahead and making more gains.

I'm not on track as I'd like to be to meet my 'finish draft 3.5 before I leave for Paris' deadline, but I still think I can meet my next goal of having a complete - almost final! - draft by April 21, 2010.

And let me tell you, I'm so glad I have this deadline. My writing partner and me set this deadline just before Christmas, and we're both trying really hard to meet it. But there's been other developments there, too. Our writing partnership has turned into a club! That's right, another writer has joined us. She's a newbie to the writing world, but she is incredibly inspiring. An idea struck her a couple weeks ago and she's been powering through the first draft of her novel. After a week of outlining, and then about two weeks worth of writing, she's officially about 17,000 words in already. See? Told ya so. Inspiring.

So, my Wednesday night Writing Club (which actually met Tuesday instead of Wednesday for this week only) is now officially a 'club' with three people. It's small, great group, and I know I wouldn't be as far along as I am now without them. And now I'm getting all cheesy, so I'll wrap things up.

I'm finishing up some revisions on Chapter 8 tonight, then it's back to Chapter 12 and continuing on to the rest of the novel this weekend.

What about you? What are your writing goals? Have you set any self-imposed deadlines?

Why I Love Outlining

I know not everyone is going to agree with me on this, but I abso-friggin-lutley love outlining my novel... but only at a certain time in the novel-writing process.

I didn't outline my novel before I wrote my first draft. Sure, I made a timeline of important events - since I need to get the chronology straight since I based a lot of things I wrote on actual events - but I do NOT outline as a first step, ever. Otherwise, I'd feel too constrained, and I'd feel that the story wouldn't naturally unfold.

That said, on draft 3.5, I got stuck. I knew what I wanted to add, I knew I needed to move some scenes around, and I knew I needed to delete a few scenes (as much as it hurt to do), but I didn't know where to start.

So, I started my outline to get the big picture of my whole novel on just a few pages. In the end, I organized this outline based on what I learned over at Paperback Writer.

But first, I started simple with the barest of the bare Chapter descriptions followed by a few hits of 'enter' to give myself some room to make handwritten notes. I then cut all the chapters into slips of paper and took two hours of sitting on the dining room floor to reorganize the pieces of the novel puzzle. It was so cathartic. I finally started to see how certain scenes worked together - or not - and made sure that the two timelines were both given the word and page space they needed.

I added, moved things around, and, gasp, threw out a couple chapters (the hardest to get rid of being the first two), and then I taped the slips of paper together.

Then it was back to the computer. I rearranged the outline and then filled out the outline with specific scenes, all the while making notes of what I needed to add or to work out when I went back to rewriting the novel. And boy oh boy do I have a ton of stuff I still need to rewrite.

But here's the thing. While I had some ideas of how I wanted the novel to change and grow before I sat down to outline, I never expected most of what I realized when I actually did the work. The novel is going to be so much better now and that much closer to being done, all because I took a break from writing (kind of) and outlined.

Do you outline? Or, how do you go about making drastic changes to your work? If you outline, when do you: before starting the novel or sometime after? How do you use outlines? Or do you absolutely hate them?