Arwen Adams Bicknell

This morning I put final touches on the book, and it is now in the hands of an agent.  And so, the waiting and a new flavor of fretting begins.

I am not sure how to feel about it. Part of me is ready to cast about for new ideas to research.  However, I’m not even sure if this one is going to launch, so that’s obviously a bit premature.  Part of me is ready to turn back to previous projects and see what I can do with those, although that raises a number of other questions that I’ll need to address, because they are completely different in tone, focus, and audience, and I don’t know the ethics and etiquette of agent or publishing politics.  (And, let’s be honest, I’m not sure I’d be terribly effective at juggling that many checklists/emotions/calendar items. Mostly emotions.) Part of me looks at the bigger picture and curls up in a ball for a nap.

So I think, perhaps, I will go on hiatus. Summer break starts for our school district tomorrow. I have all manner of plans for our youngster, and many of them involve reading. I suppose I would not be ill-advised to make up a list of similar plans for myself. I know I want to finish the Outlander series, and then I have a whole shelf full of other books—two shelves, even— that I won’t have time to finish before school starts again.

Happy Summer Reading Program, everyone.

There are big doings afoot, but I feel like if I talk about them before they happen, I will jinx them. So instead I will share something that made me laugh harder than the comments on the Hutzler 571 banana slicer.

When I was in Kentucky a while back, the big draw of the event was Diana Gabaldon. She said she is often asked, “How did you go from being a scientist to an author?” and her answer is, “Well, I wrote a book. It’s not like you have to get a license or anything.”

As someone who has written more than a couple books and is still in the process of going from writer to author, I can tell you there’s more to it than just Writing a Book. However, that is definitely the first hurdle to clear.

And thanks to a link from my dear friend Kris, I am now aware that wikiHow is at the ready to assist, with How to Write a Book.  The writing, the suggestions, the illustrations, the fact I got a blank screen when I clicked the Sample Excerpts—it was all fried gold.  My personal favorite: “The only caveat for true non-fiction is that it be factual.” Excellent protip, wikiHow!

Yes, I know some translations say it should be “love” instead of “charity,”  but I need more of the latter than the former right now—and I like to think that I try to pay all three of those forward to the best of my ability  (in my bookish pursuits, at least).

You see, I honored the commitment I made in my last post and stayed up crazy hours to finish my book.  In an effort to make it better and save me from myself, I have handed it off to three people: a beta reader to tell me if it’s boring, an editor to tell me if I’m a grammatical disaster, and a local history expert to tell me if I’ve got my narrative’s events completely ass over teakettle.

I have faith it’s a good story. I hope I did well in telling it. I need charity from these parties in their reviews and the time they spend on them, to make it the best it can be.

When I get those back, middle of next month, I believe I will finally have a book fit to print.

In the meantime, there are several tasks I need to accomplish. I have to check a few more citations at the library.  I have to do a little more research about the time period that is not going into the book but that I feel I’ll need if I’m ever called upon to talk about the book. And then there are the human contacts: There are still a couple of descendants I must try to get in touch with, not because I think they will have anything to tell me that I can use (though I will certainly ask, see that business about “hope” above), but more as a sort of courtesy  alert that I am trying to move this into a real, bona fide pipeline to publication.

Still, this is the best I’ve felt about things since I started this project.  I daresay I’m ready to start thinking about another one!

In other news, I also handed in a completely unrelated essay to another outlet and I’m hoping to hear something about that some time soon, though I’m not sure if what I provided was really what they were looking for. Time will tell!

So, there have been several developments, some of them social, some of them literary. I went to a book festival in Kentucky last month as a spousal tagalong while my husband talked America 1844.  It was interesting to go to the seminars—all two of them, his and one other—on history. The second seminar was on the Civil War, and not as instructive as I could have hoped. I asked about reading through the bias of Southern sources, and sort of figuring out what was really going on vs. what was being cleaned up for history.  The author of a book on Mary Lincoln came off a bit disdainful and told me I should consider the sources—”for example, why would I include ANYTHING Herndon said about Mary Lincoln?”—while the author of a found diary of a Tennessee woman made the friendlier (but also not particularly helpful) point that I shouldn’t let my modern biases get in the way.  Finally, the author of a biography of Benjamin Buckner spoke up and actually addressed my question, saying that in his view, it wasn’t entirely necessary to draw any distinctions; that as a writer, it is entirely in bounds to say,”this person did A and B during the day, but at night he went home and wrote X and Y in his diary,”  and to let readers draw their own conclusions about whether the actions or words are louder.  This suggestion actually DID help.

And with that in mind, I finished my first draft a couple weeks ago.  I am terribly excited about this, although I am miles from being close to an “acceptable” draft. Citations, revisions, and then (in perhaps just a couple of months) submission, and all the grief (and joy! There will be joy!) that augurs!

Then this past weekend, I went to a  symposium called After the War that focused on Reconstruction, largely within Prince William County.  While I didn’t get quite as many local anecdotes as I’d hoped, I did get a couple of good perspectives on how to deal with some historical issues I’d been struggling with, and I got to introduce myself to some of the speakers, all of whom seemed genuinely nice and engaging, and you should go find them on Twitter: @censerbilityVA, @historyGuy6465, and @JohnHennessy2.  (I think I scared Jane Censer; I’d already read her book about women in the postwar South and cited one of her constructs in my own book’s explanation, and I was so effusive I think she was afraid I might try to eat her up. I intend to send a lower-key and less fangirly email some time soon.)

And then of course, over the course of a month there was all the reading. (Admittedly, there’s not as much as there probably should have been. It is spring, after all.)

1: I finished Sin in the Second City (again).  I see poor Abbot is back in the news for plagiarizing; whether it was an honest mistake or malice seems sort of hard to tell from here.  While I don’t condone ripping off someone’s words, I do find the schadenfreude from other quarters a tad distasteful.

2: I am now on the second book in the Outlander series. I should probably be farther along, but this one is slow-going compared with the first, and I find I tend to read it more when I am waiting in line than on a regular basis each night.  Now that I’ve knocked some other things out of the way, this might change.

3: I finished listening to 1776, but I feel like I need to listen to it again. I have a terrible time with books on CD.  I listen to them during my work commute, so I start out strong, but then something in the book sends me down a rabbit hole about related topics, or I see something on the road, or I start thinking about what I need to do first when I get to work, and the next thing I know, I’ve missed a couple minutes and have to back up.  It is embarrassing.  I thought maybe it was just that book, but when I finished that one I started listening to Founding Brothers, by Joseph J. Ellis, and the same thing is happening, albeit to a lesser degree.  And it’s not that it’s dry, history writing—Ellis is absolutely amazing and engaging and FUN.  It’s all my lack of brain.  I’m not sure what I need to do to bring it around. Maybe I need to read the nonfiction on the page and listen to the fiction in the car?

So, this weekend, I have signed up for a tour of the jail (under reconstruction) where most of the events in my book occurred, so that will be another fun weekend of inspiration/excuse not to make any progress!  (And now that I have committed to not working on revisions, I will commit to trying to do some.)

Hope you all enjoy your Memorial Day weekend.