Blown Away: Publication and Taking Off

Posted by Kate Dopirak, Guest Blogger

When I took my five-year-old to fly kites, his experience reminded me of events leading up to my first book deal. Joey thought he had everything he needed to enjoy a fun day – a pirate dog kite, a gusty wind and an open field. He couldn’t wait.

But when Joey finally got in the grass, he discovered it was actually quite swampy. His new shoes got covered with mud quickly. He slipped. Having enough traction to run proved tricky. And the wind was, well, windy. Strong, actually. The kite flipped and smacked into his face. “Dumb kite!” he yelled, trying to battle the wind as he untangled the string that wrapped around his leg. He fell. Now his favorite pants – the ones with a muscle dog – were muddy, too.

This certainly wasn’t the way kite flying had played out in Joey’s imagination. Surely he thought there was nothing to it. Easy-peasy. One. Two. Three. But, no. It was harder than he’d expected. I think that challenge, along with the fact that his three-year-old brother’s kite was practically in the clouds, made him try harder.

Joey wasn’t about to give up. Again and again, he battled the wind and the mud and that unruly pirate dog. He yelled. He stomped. He wailed, “Please!” He ran that field until he panted like a track and field star. 

Then it happened. All at once the wind hit the kite just so and it went up, up, up. Joey smiled then laughed then cheered. “I did it!” Suddenly the mud hardly mattered. The kite was no longer dumb. Hey – this was fun. Really fun. He got more into it – “Watch me!”

            I took pictures and yelled encouragement – “Great job! I knew you could do it!” And that’s when it hit me that his kite-flying struggle was pretty darn similar to my getting-published struggle.

            I joined the SCBWI  and the fabulous Sally Alexander’s writing group in 2002. One-hundred-and-forty-four rejections later, I sold my first piece of writing, a poem to Highlights High Five, in 2008. Six years?! Jeez – no kidding about being hard to get some traction.

Luckily, Sally encouraged me to write personal essays. Once I started publishing those in newspapers and magazines, my confidence got a big, fat blast of wind. I sold more pieces to Highlights. And in the meantime, I attended as many SCBWI conferences as possible. I took notes like a nut and introduced myself to anyone and everyone. The amazing Kitty Griffin encouraged me to apply for the One-on-One Conference at Rutgers. And I read. I read magazines and board books and picture books and chapter books and middle-grades and YA (Okay, fine. So I read a little Chelsea Handler, too. Kill me.)

            So when it happened that I was matched with my dream agent for a manuscript critique at the WPA SCBWI Conference, I was ready. I had that same ‘all-at-once-the-wind-hit’ moment Joey experienced with his kite. But that’s not the end.

            On that kite-flying day, I cheered for Joey to let his pirate dog go higher.

“Let the string out!”

He panicked. “No! I don’t want to lose it.”

That’s exactly how I felt when that same agent I was dying to sign with challenged me to let go:

“Your chapter book can be a middle-grade. Dig deeper. This character deserves more.”

Joey finally let his string unwind so his pirate dog could soar – really soar. He was blown away. I trusted the agent, especially because I felt like she ‘got’ my work and me, enough to let my writing unwind, too. I was blown away as I revised my chapter book according to her suggestions. I resubmitted it as a middle-grade. 

She offered me representation (insert champagne popping here) and five days later sold one of my picture book manuscripts. Talk about being totally blown away! How fun to take that energy back to my works-in-progress. Now I know that just like with kite flying, the reading and the writing and ultimately, the publishing is really all about being blown away.  

Kate Dopirak is a reader, writer, and now - oh my! - an author too! Learn more about her at her website here.  

Thirsty

Guest Post by Christina St. Clair. Please visit her here.

This is a love story of sorts, but not the traditional boy meets girl, they get hot for one another, they eventually tumble into the bed and live happily ever after.  Such a beautiful fairytale, we all know, does not exist in real life, especially in relationships which, in order to deepen, take work, persistence, insight, and time.

So it is with the writing life, at least so it has been with mine.  Writing seemed a way I might quench a longing I couldn't even name.  When I was at my father's funeral in England, I began telling stories to my small nephews.  It seemed to me perhaps I could turn this interest in story-telling into a refreshing way of living.  How hard could it be?  I became convinced my words would be worthwhile enough for people to pay me money, enabling me to live freely, roam the world, and never again have to work in a nine-to-five job.  Success would surely come.

My first children's novels, I wrote feverishly, full of excitement.  I studied the genre, I attended workshops, I went to writers' conferences, I joined the SCBWI, I constantly read the best in children's literature.  I sent out my manuscripts time and time again.  The result was hardly any affirmation, and certainly no novels accepted for publication by major publishers.  I did get a monetary award for a YA historical fiction novel, which convinced me my novel would sell.  It did not.

Yeah, well--I can see other writers nodding their heads…

My thirst did not abate, but after twenty years of effort, I was ready to throw in the writer's towel, heartbroken at all the rejections, convinced of the utter futility of continuing.  Along came a writer friend, Eddy Pendarvis, who, like me, was a big fan of Pearl Buck's work.  It aggravated us that Buck never received sufficient acclaim for her writing achievements.  In spite of winning a Nobel Prize in literature, her work was strongly criticized by the literary establishment, and still is today.  We wanted to find ways to promote her best works, to acclaim this woman of high achievement and high principled altruism.  Doesn't that make you think of children's literature writers?  We little knew where our ideas would lead, but we wrote a children's story.

Eddy led the way.  She knew a Chinese scholar, Berlin Fang, who'd helped translate Peter Conn's Pearl S. Buck, A Cultural Biography into Chinese.  Berlin suggested we send our work to the Chinese publisher.  It seemed an unlikely hope, but we gave it a try.  We were offered a contract to complete the work: no royalty agreements, no definite yes to publication, merely an agreement the book might be something this publisher could use if we got it to them on time in the length they wanted.  No money, friends said, for all that work.  Don't do it!  When you have hardly made a penny for your work for years, it didn't seem a big deal to decide we weren't in this for the big bucks, but for the Buck book (forgive the pun).  We had nothing to lose.

While we sipped tea at Tim Horton's, we talked about what to write, nurturing each other's suggestions, eventually coming up with twenty chapter ideas.  A lot of reading and research ensued.  If ever I love to do something, it is looking up facts, and letting them blossom into who knows what.  It was pure nectar following leads, trying to get facts straight, writing something tailored for Chinese students.

Our deadline loomed: we met in Hillsboro, WV, where Pearl S. Buck was born, to participate in the Pearl S. Buck International Writers' Conference.  Eddy orchestrated our participation, and Eddy insisted I come along.  What a good friend!  Others too ( Kitty Griffin, Marie Manilla, Laura Bentley, Philip St. Clair, Kathy Combs, Jim Gifford, Susan Caldwell to name a few), have turned my writing life from arid desert to crystal waters.  Eddy had obligations to fulfill at the event, but in between, we worked feverishly, putting our chapters together, smoothing out the writing, trying to get rid of the overlapping ideas we'd both used.  As I recall, at the end of the evening before we retired to our tiny room in a B & B, we sipped on fruit wine (Yes, Kathy, I am still drinking wine).

Eddy fed our completed chapters to Berlin who, with great mastery of both languages, translated them into Chinese.  We agreed on a three-way split of royalties.

Before long, we sent the best version we could manage to the publisher.  It seemed to take forever, but eventually a contract arrived.  We signed it.  The book we co-authored, Between Two Worlds: a Biography of Pearl S. Buck, was eventually released by the Shanghai Foreign Language Education Press in China as an English/Chinese reader.

The published book, beautifully illustrated on good stock, filled us with satisfaction.  We three (two writers and one translator) received royalty checks for about $200 each--not a huge sum, but a reminder of the power of friendship, persistence, connectedness.  For me, as well, this book gave hope for other writing projects.

My urge to write had definitely been encouraged.  I rewrote, reformatted, revised and sent out tighter versions of two young adult novels.  I gave up worrying about the outcome, I stopped needing anyone to tell me my work was good enough, and I accepted whatever happened.  At last, two publishers offered me contracts.  Instead of Harper Collins or Holt (do they even exist anymore?), my books got taken on by Bloodmoon and Rogue Phoenix.

The big publishers didn't want my novels, which certainly humbled me, but these e-publishers with funky names said yes.  At first, I felt despondent:  Blood moon, I muttered to myself, Rogue Phoenix?  But, you know, it's been a wonderful experience.  The editor and publisher, Christine Young (RoguePhoenix), has given me insightful suggestions greatly improving my historical fiction novel.  Marlene Satter (aka Lee Barwood), my editor at Bloodmoon, whose supernatural novels inspire me, is a psychic soul mate.  Her book, Some Cost a Passing Bell, available on Amazon, is a book about mystical gifts used for love of Mother Earth.

I believe I can hear the universe chuckling.  I am laughing too, no longer concerned about money or recognition, simply enjoying the process, whether good and bad, for no doubt I have become a better writer, and hopefully I am a deeper person.  I feel as if I am drinking sweet water from a freshly dug well.