Love My Dog, Love My Protagonist

My daughter had just turned eight when we moved to England several years ago, and while she made a few good friends right away, she had difficulty penetrating the cliques that are a part of grade school. When I heard that she was spending lunchtimes not in the schoolyard playing with her classmates but inside with one of the teachers, I was indignant, probably more so than she. How could the other girls and boys not want to play with her? How could they not appreciate how fun she is, how funny, how athletic, how smart? 

I wasn’t filled with the anger that accompanied the one time she was taunted (a boy called her pancake face, which is apparently a disparaging term for an Asian; my daughter was the only non-Indian Asian—not to mention the only American and the only Jew—in the entire school; she and the boy eventually became, if not friends, friendly). Instead I ached with a quiet mournfulness.

Now that I’m submitting my latest manuscript to agents, I ache in the same way for my character Steve.

Steve is one of the two narrators of 100 Days, the novel I’m shopping around. He is also one of the two narrators of the novel I wrote before Beyond Billicombe (which, by the way, is available as a paperback and a Kindle ebook). That I wrote a second novel about Steve without managing to get representation for the first one shows how much I love the character. (Or it shows how absolutely pig-headed and impractical I am—your call.)

Steve is a young man from Devon who suffers from undifferentiated schizophrenia. The first book tells of his budding friendship with a visiting writer and his move to London. 100 Days picks up five years later, as he is hospitalized for a suicide attempt and a psychotic break following his first romantic relationship.

Of course, I don’t love Steve as fiercely as I do my daughter. But I think it’s fair to say that I adore him as much as I do my dog, a statement that may sound odd to those who don’t have a pet but one that surely makes sense to those who do. Just as I want everyone who meets my dog (that's him in the photo above) to acknowledge how cute, how sweet, how irresistible he is, I want everyone who reads about Steve to admire his self-deprecating wit, his gutsiness, his determination.

So it hurts me when agents read the first few pages of 100 Days and reply along the lines of, It’s well written, but it’s not for us; I just don’t love it enough to represent it.

How can you not love Steve?

So in keeping with the fiction writer’s mantra of “show, don’t tell,” I’m including the first chapter of 100 Days below. Would anyone like to read more? 

Chapter 1

Steve

This time I’m going to do it right. No half-arsed slicing and dicing with a butter knife in a public toilet. No overdose of pills that makes you wish you were dead without actually doing the trick. No noose around a clothes rack that’s too rickety to support the weight and comes crashing down before you even have the chance to kick the chair away.

            First, I lock the bedroom door. Next, barricade it with my nightstand. Then the pills, every one of them I have, except the ones for my high blood pressure and that. They wouldn’t be much good, would they? I wash them down, two and four at a time, with straight vodka. Like I said, I’m not taking any chances this time.

            It feels good to focus. To have something to focus on. For the past few weeks, since getting out of hospital, or even since landing back in hospital before then, everything’s been blurred. Like those paintings that look like a landscape when you’re standing a meter away but when you get up close are nothing but dots. Sometimes I can barely make out where I am, what’s surrounding me. What all the colors are supposed to be. What all the shadows are from. But now everything is clearer than it’s ever been. The lettering on some of my pills. The grain of the wood on the floor planks, each lazy curve. Each tiny point of the knife along its edge, winking at me. A friendly wink.

            By the fifth or seventh mouthful, I’m having a tough time forcing the pills down, even with the vodka easing the way. Last time I didn't take the pills in one fell swoop. Just shoveled down a few here and there when I remembered. Though last time I don’t think I was trying to kill myself. I didn’t have my shit together enough to have a goal, really, other than to shut up the mumbles and stop thinking. About Diandra, and everything else.

Harder and harder to swallow. Even though after all these years I’m a dab hand at pill-taking. Just about the only skill I have, isn’t it? Though as Cat would say, that and fifty cents will get you a cup of coffee—not even, she adds whenever she uses that expression.

            Woozy. Filmy. Hope to hell I don’t sick the pills up. Grit your teeth, hiss the mumbles. Swallow, you arsewipe, swallow. For fuck’s sake, surely you can do this right. I thought I’d drowned the mumbles once and for all back in December, during the bender that landed me in hospital and now here. But they’re back. Or maybe it’s their ghosts.

            Now, the steak knife. I swiped it from the kitchen. The knives are supposed to be in one of the locked drawers, so only the staff can get to them. But you know what care staff are like. You can’t blame them for getting sloppy. They’re paid, what, eight quid an hour? Besides, it’s been so quiet here in the house, at least in the weeks since I arrived. No real fights. Most everyone agreeing to take their meds when they’re supposed to, coming to group more or less on time, all but one or two showering regularly. Julia’s the most troublesome of us, and she’s half-catatonic five days out of seven, so the main issue with her is getting her to actually eat and to use the toilet instead of pissing and shitting herself.

            So I’ve got the steak knife, and I’m tying around my arm a scrap of an old T-shirt I’d ripped up last night. Tying it above the elbow. Like they do before taking blood, so that the veins on the inside of my left arm pop right up to the surface. Nurses have a hard time taking blood from me, seeing as I’ve got so much scarring on my wrists and arms. I don’t want to have a hard time cutting myself open. Especially not the way my fingers are growing thicker and harder to manipulate. That’s a good word, manipulate. Cat buys me these word-a-day calendars every year, which is where I picked up that one.

            Fuck Cat, snarl the mumbles. The mumbles, so the doctors say, aren’t coming from anywhere but instead my head. Most times I agree with them, the doctors, I mean. But when the mumbles start chanting Fuck Cat, fuck the bitch, I have to doubt what the doctors say. Because while I may have a lot of crazy thoughts, I’d never think something like Fuck Cat. She’s pretty much all I’ve got.

Though I don’t really even have her.

            I press the serrated edge of the knife against my wrist. I can’t feel it. Can’t even feel the knife in the grip of my hands, my fingers curled around its handle. Not until I’ve been watching a gorgeous pure red, gleaming rivulet of blood trickle down my arm, in no hurry as it glides toward my elbow, do I realize I’ve actually cut through.

            It’s so wet, the blood, so bright. So clean. The way it pulses so slowly, it really is the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.

            And right now it’s pretty much all I can see. Everything around it has constricted. I’m not even sure if I’m still slicing away.

            I finally know what it’s like to be completely happy. No worries, nothing to fear. My eyelids close, but I can still see the blood. Nothing but blood. Not even my arm anymore. I’m floating on the blood, and it’s floating me away.

Querying the Query

“Dying is easy. Comedy is hard”—attributed to Edmund Kean.

Writing a novel is easy. Writing a query letter is hard.

Okay, easy isn’t perhaps accurate in describing writing fiction. But it’s sure as hell less effort, and much more rewarding and pleasurable, than writing query letters designed to interest agents in your book.

Having met my self-imposed deadline to have my work in progress, tentatively titled 100 Days, ready for submission to agents by New Year’s, I’m now struggling with the query letter. This is the sixth book for which I’ve written a query, so you’d think I'd be somewhat nonchalant about the task. But while I did have an agent for my first three novels, the two I wrote subsequently, some two decades later, were never picked up. I received requests for pages and full manuscripts, so I guess my queries weren’t complete failures. But all the same, summarizing a 30-chapter novel into 250 enticing, alluring words is, for me, a minuet of self-doubt and angst.

When writing 100 Days (and my other novels), I didn’t worry about pleasing anyone but me and of serving anyone but the characters. With the query letter, though, I have to home in on what will make a complete stranger, one who reads for a living with an eye for commercial prospects, want to try to sell my book to editors who read for a living with an eye for commercial prospects. And in the past, the lack of commercial prospects was the primary reason agents and editors gave for not taking on my books.

I should take consolation that the agents and editors who rejected by books never denigrated, and usually praised, my writing. But the book I recently self-published, Beyond Billicombe, was to my mind commercial: It could be considered a genre (mystery); it had as a protagonist a young Hollywood actress; it took place primarily in a setting that was somewhat off the beaten track (north Devon, England) but not disorientingly foreign; it was compact (73,000 words).

100 Days, on the other hand… Well, here’s where my query stands so far:

After slicing his wrists and overdosing on pills and vodka, 27-year-old schizophrenic Steve finds himself in hell—or is it a hospital? Yes, it’s a hospital, but as far as Steve’s concerned, it might as well be hell. So once he realizes that his latest suicide attempt failed, he persuades his friend and guardian, Cat, to kill him in 100 days unless he changes his mind. But does she actually agree to this, or is it just another of Steve’s delusions? And will Steve recover enough to decide he doesn’t want to die after all?

My 68,000-word novel 100 Days recounts Steve’s breakdown, the events leading up to it, and his unsteady steps toward functionality, in sometimes conflicting first-person narratives from both Steve and Cat that combine fear and sadness with surprising humor. While committed to a London hospital and struggling to differentiate reality from psychosis, past from present, Steve recalls his relationship with his girlfriend Diandra and its sudden end. At the same time, Cat races to help Steve become the fully functioning, engaging man he had been prior to this latest breakdown even as he continues counting down to the day when he expects her to put an end to his life.

My own husband has already informed me that he won’t be reading it; he “doesn’t do” books about mental illness. (Given that it took him eight months to get around to finishing Beyond Billicombe, one could argue that he “doesn’t do” books written by wife, full stop.)

What do you think? Does the query grab you? Should I mention that it has a more-or-less happy ending? Is 100 Days something you’d like to read? 

Size Doesn't Matter—Except When It Does

When I was a copyeditor at Vogue, one of my duties was to return to the articles editors any stories that needed to be cut to fit into the allotted space. On one occasion, shortly after an editor whittled down an article for me, I was told that a half-page had opened up, and she needed to add some of the cut material back in. When I informed her, expected her to be delighted, she looked at me mournfully. “Now that I justified cutting those sentences,” she said, “I don’t know how I can justify putting them back in.”

I’m in a similar situation now, with my work in progress, 100 Days.

Fairly satisfied (is a writer ever completely satisfied?) with my latest version, I ran a word count. The novel comes to 65,000 words. From what I’ve read online, a novel should ideally be at least 70,000 words.

My conundrum: Should I try to add another 5,000 words before submitting it to agents? Should I keep it as is and in my cover letters fib that it is 70,000 words? (I loathe lying, so I probably won’t do that.) Or should I keep it as is, mention in my cover letter that it’s 65,000 words, and hope that the word count doesn’t automatically turn off the agent? (For what it's worth, my recently published novel, Beyond Billicombe, is a spot-on 75,000 words.)

I’m sure I can add another 5,000 words. Of the two narrators of 100 Days, Steve is perhaps my favorite of the characters I’ve ever created. Writing in his voice is a pleasure; I love hearing from him. But he suffers from undifferentiated schizophrenia; the book chronicles one of his breakdowns, and among his symptoms is alogia, or poverty of speech. I take literary license in presenting his narration—a book told by someone suffering alogia in its purest form would be a struggle to read—but I hesitate to have him speak much more than he already does.

The other narrator, Cat, is highly social and verbal person. She could easily contribute more to the story. But by having her add another chapter or two, the novel may become unbalanced, and the reader might feel more distanced from Steve than I’d like.

Right now, I think I have the right amount of words for the story that I’m telling. But as a professional writer and editor, I know that sometimes the right amount of words for the story isn’t the same as the right amount of words for the assignment. When I need to hand in a 1,500-word article, I need to make it roughly 1,500 words, even if I think the story would benefit from being 1,800 words long, or if I can communicate everything that needs to be said in 1,200 words.

I’m going to ponder this a bit. And I'm heartened by a blog post from two years ago in which industry veteran Colleen Lindsay writes, "lately there's been a trend toward more spare and elegant literary novels as short of 65,000." I’ll go over the manuscript again, see if there are areas that should be expanded upon. Usually I focus on tightening—I like to think of myself as a concise (though far from Hemingwayesque) writer. But if any of you have advice or suggestions, I’d love to hear them. 

(Above is a photo of Bistro Benito in Earls Court, a favorite restaurant of mine since my sister lived in London, back in the '90s. It's also a favorite of Cat, one of the narrators of 100 Days.)