Life Portraits - Rejection

I got my latest rejection for my novel Life Portraits yesterday. This particular agent had had a partial manuscript for four months. A typical rejection: she was "intrigued by the premise", thought it had "appeal in today's market", but "just didn't fall in love".

The tally of queries and rejections for 2009 are:

I sent out 56 queries.
I got 26 rejections.
I got an astounding 30 "no response means no". In other words, 30 agents couldn't even be bothered to respond to my query with a simple no.

This is pretty discouraging for a novel that finished in the finals of the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award. Here's the Publisher's Weekly review that I received as part of the contest:

When a woman inherits a series of nude photographs of an unknown man, it triggers a search for the truth behind her dead mother’s mysterious history in this superb novel. Shifting back and forth between the present and the past, with portraits both metaphorical and literal, the parallels between the lives and personalities of young mother Sally Swain and her own newly-deceased mother, photographer Eva, come into detailed focus. Sally’s search draws her into a quest for her unknown father’s identity as Eva’s tale moves from the 1950s to the 1970s amid the drama of the Civil Rights movement and explores her relationships with two very different men: doctor and budding politician Paul James, and confused, often-depressed artist Isaac Rutherford. The suspense is maintained masterfully throughout, and Sally’s slow maturation as she learns the lessons of the past is handled gently and effectively. Paul, Isaac and their family members are richly portrayed with a complex and realistic balance of virtues and flaws as Sally slowly unravels Eva’s secrets and resolves her own personal challenges in the deeply satisfying conclusion.

What now? I suppose I'll keep plugging away at it. This is not my only novel, of course. I have another that is completed and yet another in progress. But I can't pretend that I am not disappointed.

Tag Cloud of Life Portraits

A tag cloud is a visual representaion of the words (tags) in a document where the size of the font correlates to the frequency of the word. Tagcrowd.com has an easy interface for generating tag clouds from text.

Here is the tag cloud for my novel Life Portraits. The names of the characters and several themes of the novel are prominent.

almost anything arm around art asked atlanta away beach bed behind better boys called camera car coffee dark different done door enough eva everything eyes face father felt found front going gone hair hands happened head help home house hub isaac jack job kat kept kids kissed knew life light lisa looked love man married maybe miss mother name nothing opened paper paul people photo pictures portraits pulled really room sally sat school seemed someone something started stay stood surprised talk things think thought together told tom took town tried turned waiting walked wanted watched window woman work years york

created at TagCrowd.com

Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award - Quarterfinalist!

I made it to the top 500 in the ABNA contest, out of a reported 10,000 entries. This is for my novel Life Portraits. If you would like to read my excerpt, it is on the Amazon site here: Life Portraits.

The two reviews I received from Amazon were positive. Here are the reviews and the "pitch" for the novel:

Review
I couldn't possibly count the number of novels, poems, autobiographies, paintings and songs which were inspired by the fact that the author felt like they never really knew their own parents. It's a bug question, this one of identity. And how can we possibly know who we are if we never knew where we came from in the first place. It may be an over done idea but the premise behind "Life Portraits" that I picked up from reading the snippet, is a very valid one that leaves a lot of room to play around in. We never really realize it because we spend so much time looking for information that is sensational but people are fascinating. Really they are. Everyone has a story that is amazing and deserves to be told. And so these novels keep popping up, the stories of those we never really got to know and no they're dying maybe or dead and there's all this unfinished business....no, the premise for this isn't very original. But it's written well and the little I read gave me enough mental questions about the characters introduced that if I had the whole thing in front of me I'd probably read on.

Review
This excerpt from "Life Portraits" is especially interesting to me because of the historical references to Atlanta, where I grew up during the same time as Eva would have been there. Incidents Eva, Sally's mother, photographed such as Lester Maddox blocking blacks from his restaurant with an axe-handle in the door were events I lived through and my family talked about, so this makes the portraits literally jump off the page for me. It is the rare writer who can evoke a strong sense of smell from me when I'm reading, twice removed from the experience being described, but this writer did. I can smell those sharp, acrid darkroom chemicals, and that smell completely pulls me into the story in a way that simple visual imaginings cannot do. I can still smell it, half an hour after reading it. The choice of photographs as a means of telling the story--photographs that I imagine mostly in black and white, as a serious newspaper or war photographer might shoot them--is an intriguing hook; a means of opening up a world of secrets and buried history, like the hidden nudes in Eva's locked cabinet drawer. The writing itself is quite good. I enjoy the textures of complex sentences and layered imagery, so this is a writer whose skill commands my interest in the writer as well as the story--much as I am interested in following an excellent actor's career through and transcending the characters he or she plays. Of course, I am curious to know whether Sally's inheritance is scant or somehow deliberately hurtful because of her rift with her mother--it is not money or property, after all--or (as I suspect through the foreshadowing) the greatest treasure a complex woman has to leave a daughter she deeply loved and lost.

Product Description
Imagine Sally Swain's surprise when she inherits from her mother twenty years of nude photographs of a strange man, all taken before Sally was born. Life Portraits tells the story of Eva Swain, photographer, and Isaac Rutherford, painter, as they carry out a twenty-year art project, beginning in 1955, to meet once a year and record each other's portraits. Life Portraits also tells the story of Sally, who left home at seventeen and returned fourteen years later, a single mother, in time for her mother Eva's funeral, to discover that Eva had lied to her about her father. She sets out to solve the mystery surrounding the nude portraits and find the identity of her father, and along the way discovers that she is her mother's daughter. What she learns forces her to examine her relationship with her own daughter - and her daughter's father. Part mystery and part love story, Life Portraits should appeal to readers that love complex characters and family sagas. The story of the twenty-year-long art project is original and captivating, and is spun out in alternating scenes with Sally's search for the mysterious man in the portraits.

Judging is based in part on customer reviews, so if you like what you read in my excerpt, please write a short review for me. Juding for the semifinals is over on April 15th.

NaNoWriMo 2007

I've haven't posted much about NaNoWriMo this year, but yes, I have been plugging away at my new novel, Life Portraits (code name LP), under the disguise of a NaNo novel. And it has gone very well. Unlike past years, I have not been way out ahead of the word count, spewing less-than-stellar prose that is destined to be abandoned or rewritten. Instead I have been taking my time, doing plenty of thinking, trying to write a better product the first time through. What a concept. Maybe it will save me time in the long run.

And I think I have come up with a much better draft. I have reached the NaNo goal of 50k words in under a month. The novel is far from over. Actually, I am just getting into the complications in the middle section. Final word count might be as much as 120k, I think.

So I am still plugging away at it, and will be for another couple of months. But if you have never done NaNoWriMo, I highly recommend it.

NaNoWriMo starts again

Signed up for the National Novel Writing Month again, a little reluctantly. I've done it the last two years without any real problem, but I wanted to take my time with the next novel, code named Life Portraits. I'm worried that I might not be able to stay focussed without the deadline of something like NaNoWriMo, so I think I will shoot for 50k words on the novel next month. That is really less than half of what I need for a first draft anyway.

Research for new novel

Went to the main branch of the Atlanta library this afternoon to do some research for my new novel - code named "Life Portraits" or LP for short. Two of the characters lived in Atlanta beginning in 1955, and I needed a good way for them to meet. An incident at Tech in December of 1955 that I had read about in one of my history books sounded interesting, so I looked at the microfilm archives of the Atlanta newspapers to get the real scoop.

Atlanta Journal headline for Saturday Dec 3rd 1955 - "Tech Students Jeer at Capitol, Mansion". It seems that Tech got selected for the Sugar bowl that year, and word got out that the opposing team, the University of Pittsburgh, had a black player. Governor Griffin of Georgia pitched a hissy fit, sending a telegram to the Georgia Board of Regents that, by our standards today, would be grossly racist. Actually, by the standards of the time it was probably racist. Here is the some of the telegram - you decide:

"It is my request that athlete teams of units of the University System of Georgia not be permitted to engage in contests with other teams where the races are mixed on such teams or where segregation is not required among spectators at such events. The South stands at Armageddon. The battle is joined. We cannot make the slightest concessions to the enemy in this dark and lamental hour of struggle."

And so on and so forth. Remarkable what was uttered in public by politicians back then. And this was a telegram that he released to the papers.

Anyway, the Tech students reacted by throwing a little mini-riot. Two thousand of them marched on the capital and broke in, hung the Governor and burned him in effigy, and then tried to march on the Governor's mansion. They almost made it, but got turned back by police. Finally about 3:30 am they broke up, but not before three of them got arrested. Oh those wacky kids. In a couple of days the Regents basically laughed down the Governor, and Tech went to the game.

But it's a cool story. One of my characters is a female, trying to be a press photographer, the other can be a Tech student (they were exclusively male back then). An interesting way for them to meet.