The Great Literary Agent Race, Part 3

Here it was, November 2008, and I'd more or less finished licking my wounds from the Backspace conference, although I certainly wasn't finished whining. Not that I'm ever finished whining.

Anyway, I spend the next six months working on my novel at a grueling pace. No kidding -- I was doing all nighters, sometimes thirty-six, even forty hours at a stretch. And I hate to admit it but, having always been a night owl ever since ever, those hours never changed for me over the next 4 1/2 years of writing. I doubt they ever will, either.

Anyway, come March of 2009, I thought I was done! I felt great. I signed up for another, much smaller, SEAK conference, this one held in Chicago in April 2009 with Robert Dugoni as the featured lecturer. 

Of course, this draft manuscript got totally trashed, too (albeit not quite as brutally as before).

However...the conference was probably the best I've ever gone to, for two reasons:

First, the attendees (mostly doctors writing medical thrillers) were a fabulous bunch -- fascinating, erudite and fun fun fun, and yes, I'm talking MDs here, mostly 20+ years into their practice!

Second, and even more important, Bob Dugoni changed my writing life.  

Let me tell you what Bob Dugoni did: He told me to make the lawyer the protagonist. As Bob explained, I'm a lawyer, people are interested in lawyer stories, I have a story to tell, and my lawyer character should be the one to tell it.

That meant a total rewrite of my novel, because the client, i.e., John Zambelli, Celebrity Chef, had been my lead. 

Back to the drawing board. 

Except I didn't want to abandon my chef.

The Great Literary Agent Race, Part 2

So now, step back in time to 2005 or thereabouts....

That's when I decided to write a book about how custody cases affect lawyers. I wanted it to be an insider's look on the process of what we do, why we do it, and how we live and breathe these cases. Except I couldn't -- the attorney-client privilege forbids revealing client confidences except under certain, very narrow circumstances (i.e., to prevent death or significant bodily injury).

That's when the notion of my writing a novel about a custody case took root.

There was a problem: Although I'd written a lot of professional articles, I hadn't written fiction since, oh, maybe high school... And writing fiction is light-years away from writing affidavits, briefs, and all other papers that I routinely crank out in the course of legal representation. (I wrote here, on this blog, about how different the two forms of writing are: http://bedroom-to-courtroom.blogspot.com/2012/01/lawyer-vs-writer.html.)

In a nutshell, the fiction writer SHOWS a character's feelings, both physical and personal; shows actions and scenes through dialogue, movement, description; paces the story to avoid glossing over nuances, and to ensure logical connections (i.e., someone has to actually get from point a to point b).

The legal writer recites factual information more objectively (albeit with the perspective and interests  of the client first and foremost), stating the facts and then weaving in the law to demonstrate how it applies to those facts.

It took me ten or fifteen years to master the art of legal writing. And then? I had to unlearn it -- completely -- in order to learn the craft of writing fiction. That process took me at least three years.

I started by taking a four-day writing conference designed to help lawyers learn how to write fiction. Every lawyer there wanted to be Grisham or Turow -- that was the essential concept behind the conference, anyway. The course was run by SEAK, and the featured lecturers were Stephen Horn and Lisa Scottoline. (Lisa is fabulous in person, by the way.)  Both are criminal lawyers who write  terrific thrillers, which is not my background nor was it my intended genre. That didn't matter at all for purposes of the conference -- these two excellent writers/instructors made me realize how much I needed to learn.

Over the next three years, I waffled about, then gradually drafted a shitty, cathartic manuscript (that looked nothing like Client Relations) in which I struggled to put my limited knowledge of fiction-writing, based on that one conference, to work.

I then went to another writer's conference, this time hosted by Backspace (an online writer's group), in May 2008, thinking I knew what I was doing. Wrong. At the conference, the opening pages of my draft were blasted into shards by breakout groups. The agents and attendees in my breakout groups were pretty merciless -- they'd use my (lousy) draft, and those of other aspiring writers, read the first paragraphs aloud, and then say how terrible they were. And they explained why. It was a disheartening, miserable experience. After I returned home, I cursed a lot and told myself to forget the whole damn thing.

It took months to get over that conference. Looking back, I believe that the conference itself was really really good. Being publicly drawn and quartered was quite a learning experience  - although I still wish it hadn't been so, well, PUBLIC.

Anyway.

By November of 2008, I braced myself for another attempt at the manuscript...

The Great Literary Agent Race: Part 1

I've decided to do a series of posts on the logistics of getting a literary agent. There are a ton of blogs on the subject, some more helpful than others. Many are by agents, some are by publishing professionals, others are by established writers.

This series is based on my personal experience as a new writer: I'll start at the end, i.e., where I'm at right now, then move backward in time to when I began to write fiction, in separate posts...

Okay.

I just sent out the revised draft of Client Relations to my agent.

I pored over the draft for the zillioneth time, eliminating excess words, duplicative words, unneeded adverbs, repetitive sentence structure, missing prepositions, etc. --- after zipping up a plot point or two. Oh, did I say this was for the zillioneth time?

Imagine my bleary-eyed condition. Imagine how elated I am, too - because, day-um, I have an agent! And not just any agent. I have The Ultimate Agent.

So now? It's hurry up and wait (a) for my agent to approve of my edits; (b) for her to shop the book, assuming she thinks it's ready; and (c) for the rights to be sold.  I'm not thinking past that yet!

Client Relations Is Now Off-Line

Hi all,

I have an offer of representation from a top literary agent now, so I've deleted my posts that had excerpts from various stages of drafting.

I'm way too thrilled to blog more about it right now... more soon!

Another Awesome Woman's Life To Celebrate

A truly kickass woman, who not only spearheaded women's power on Wall Street, but paved the way for the end of discriminatory practices against women in the business community, died at age 80 on Saturday.

Her name? Muriel Siebert.

She had a seat on the New York Stock Exchange, back when women weren't even allowed on the elevator at the Union League Club. She was the first woman to become New York State Superintendent of Banking. She formed one of the first discount brokerage firms. She spent millions to help other women in business. She developed a curriculum for high school students to learn personal finance. She used a bit of her money to buy furs and learn to fly. Oh, and she made the Stock Exchange install a ladies' room on the seventh floor.

I remember when I had my job interview at Morgan, Lewis & Bockius, and my soon-to-be mentor took me to lunch at the University Club. Women were't allowed to be members, and he had to take me to a special ladies' dining room for lunch. I couldn't even peek into the main dining room. By 1987, the University Club barriers came a-tumblin' down. But so many other, more insidious barriers remain, even today, against women attaining equality, prominence and power inside diehard male bastions of the business world.

Women in business, women in the professions, women in the arts and in the trades. We still tend not to climb to the same levels as men when it comes to money, position or clout. Still, we owe a huge thank you and a moment of celebratory silence in memory of a woman who put her energy, her time, and her money, where her heart was: Toward equalizing women as power-movers and money-makers and, for heaven's sake, as people.

Away, But I Have An Excuse

I have been a total bum here, ignoring my own b-to-c blog.

My reason?

I finished Client Relations (again), and have been on the hunt for literary representation. I scour published writers' bogs, hoping for pearls of genius on How To Do It (or 'How I Did It' a la Young Frankenstein). I read their stories, and, I dunno, it's such a long shot, no matter what... : /

So I've done my best, and now it's an excruciating, tortuous wait. Actually, let me re-word that: I'm scared shitless.

Making It Stink Less For The Kids

I've been reading a bunch of blog posts about how screwed up kids get (i) when their parents are divorcing or divorced (e.g., kids feel pressured to take sides); or (ii) when their parents are - well, just a mess. 
http://afamilysheartbreak.com/  
http://www.divorcesaloon.com/2010/09/20/octomom-nadya-suleman-broke-welfare-next-will-she-lose-custody-of-her-kids/).

So I'm thinking, okay, everything thinks divorce lawyers make it worse, by pushing people into being even more polarized. They only care about the money and don't care how screwed up the kids get. Right?  

Wrong. 

The American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers (I'm admittedly biased since I'm a Fellow) has a some terrific cheap publications, and even a couple of free links on their web site which are amazing, all of which are instructive, informative, and designed to reduce friction and tension.  I've shared the links on a few blogs, and thought it only right to post them on my own: http://www.aaml.org/go/library/publications/

With all that collective knowledge (from the top 1600 divorce lawyers in the US) of exactly how rotten life can be for the kids who are in the midst of family upheaval, the AAML was able to create a Children's Bill of Rights.

Yes, it's that good.  Please judge for yourself.

http://www.aaml.org/sites/default/files/childrens%20bill%20of%20rights.pdf