Hi everyone! I’m A. Grey. ‘A’ is for Artemis, but it seemed a bit
high drama so I shortened it. The lovely Christi asked if I would
guest host on her blog for a day so here I am! *wiggles with
excitement at being asked to quest host* I met Christi when she guest
hosted over at Pimp My Novel last year and we’ve been lurking on each
others’ blogs ever since.
Alright, nitty-gritty details… I write YA, everything from fantasy
to contemporary, although I’ve got a serious soft spot for dystopian.
I’ve only had two short stories published and I haven’t snagged an
agent yet, but oh what fun I’ve had so far on this strange and winding
road to becoming what I call a ‘commercially published’ author! Maybe
I can make you smile with some of the things I’ve experienced, but
mostly I hope you’ll go away from here and look for a pen or computer
and start pounding out a book that one day someone will squee over in
a bookstore 
So to begin…
I think that I started out backwards. Most writers set out right
from the start with the goal of getting published. For the first five
years that I obsessively wrote, I insisted to everyone who mentioned
publication that I never wanted to be published. Looking back, I
think this was because I understood – without really understanding
what it was that I understood – that in order to get published, you
have to give your stories away, on some level.
I was a big oral storyteller when I was a kid. We used to spend
hours sitting around the campfire telling ghost stories. Many of them
were made up on the spot and involved horses that had passed away or
long-dead soldiers who had purportedly stayed in the house (once a
Revolution era tavern) where our riding instructor lived. But the
stories I wrote down were always my own, secret havens to which I
could return to for escape. It took me a long time to grow into
wanting to share those stories, to decide that I was willing to cast
them out into the wilderness that is ‘public domain’ where anyone can
read them.
So I wrote, uh, a herd of high fantasy books… I wrote one, then a
second, third, fourth, and I started a fifth. I knew where the story
was going, I knew the characters (all, like, nine of them, each with
their own POV) and I knew the world. Anything else? Well, who needs
to know anything else? Yeah, face/palm. And hell yes I queried that
first book! Like three dozen times. And, big surprise, the suckage
was rejected by all. But ‘suckage’ doesn’t mean ‘trash’. I still
have all those books. I’ve heavily revised the first two, turning the
series YA (which it already was, it just didn’t know it yet)
consolidating the POV to mostly one character (it was her story
anyhow) and basically just utilizing everything I’ve learned since I
started them, to try and better them.
Meanwhile, I began and worked on numerous other projects, got two
short stories written and published, entered a few contests, and
didn’t win. But I did get some feedback from judges, and I eagerly
gobbled up what they had to say.
When I look back now at those first books, I belly laugh at my own
blissful ignorance. But I do it in the way that an adult wolf might
watch a pup yanking on the leg of a moose carcass. The pup doesn’t
know that the moose – in life – could crush it with one kick, but the
pup also doesn’t know that one day, with the help of it’s pack mates,
it will be able to bring down such a creature. The pup only knows
that the moose leg tastes good! That’s the way I look at writers who
write for love of writing. They just know that it’s what they want.
Everything else, they figure out as they go. We grow and develop and
eventually find a place in our own pack of agents, editors, publishers
and fans, and then together we take down the moose that is the
publishing industry! Um, yeah, I’m an outdoorsy type, so my analogies
are too…
So, onward! I wrote a book. Yeah, another one. I guess, really, it
wrote me. I was just doing my high fantasy thing and *WHACK!*
Cheez-it! Well, in my case, Book! This girl showed up in my head and
she was from my world, but life as I knew it no longer existed. She
was ill-tempered, golden-hearted, fiercely independent, and she
preferred life without underwear. Seriously there are innuendos of the
first line in there. I had to tell her story. Thusly, my dystopian
YA, EVERNOW, was born. I wrote Evernow in about a month, then spent a month revising it and struggled with writing queries for a week or two.
Finally, I started sending them out. I think I sent the first two
out in November of 2009. One was rejected immediately. The other
resulted in a request for the full ms. *KILL ME NOW THEY REQUESTED
THE FULL!* Not only that, it was a ‘big’ agent. Oh, I thought I’d
die. We exchanged several emails, and while in the end he declined to
rep me, he praised my writing, and my voice (that elusive ‘voice’) and
his choice to decline was actually pretty cool. See, he had a client
working on something similar, and he felt torn, even drawn to me over
them, so he chose them. Which somehow made me love him despite the
rejection.
I queried again. And again. And some more. Some responses were
straight form rejections, others requests, then rejections. The more
I queried, the more I tweaked Evernow, and revised it. The rejections
started to have more compliments in them. And I started to hate the
word ‘but’.
It’s a funny thing. When we start out, we respond to form rejections
with hair-rending wails of “WHY? I swear I’ll fix it if you just tell
me what to fix!”
Then you move on to the less irritating ‘Just not for me’ rejections
and you get hopeful. “Ok, so whatever. Someone out there WILL think
it’s just for them!”
And finally you get to the ‘Your writing is
strong/commercial/moving/engaging/polished/insertbutterytermhere, BUT’
It doesn’t really matter what comes after the ‘but’. At least not for
the first few hours after you read the rejection. I even rejected
myself once, before realizing that I was being asked for a full,
because the agent had used the word ‘but’ and I zoned out as soon as I
got to that word. My brother still teases me over that.
While all this drama was going on, I kept writing. I wrote a
contemporary YA, from a guy’s point of view, and plotted other books.
I entered a few contests, and didn’t win anything. I went to the
Sirens Conference, twice, and met a squeeable number of other writers
and authors and had a ridiculous amount of fun with them. I wrote,
and I lived, I lived and I wrote. And I kept learning.
I also kept getting rejected, but it started to not matter quite as
much. It was as if I’d rediscovered that me who had insisted they
would never be published. I reaffirmed that I didn’t need to be
published, I wanted to be published, which is a very important
distinction. The primary reason I want to get published, is because I
want my stories to positively affect young people the way I was
positively affected by the books I read – hence my choice to write YA.
After that, I’d love to make just enough money to let me write at
least most of the time, if not all the time. But if I live to be a
hundred and never hit the ‘big time’, I’ll die happy, so long as I
write until my fingers can’t hold a pen any longer. And should it
come to that, I don’t want people to remember me as ‘that poor woman
who wrote her whole life and never got published’ I want them to
remember me as ‘that woman who spent her whole life writing and loved
every minute of it’.
Right now I’m in the middle of a companion novel to Evernow, set many
years after the original story, but with cameos by a few of Evernow’s
characters. I’ve got a few queries out (I still dance around with
‘send regret’ each time one goes out, fearing that I’ll find a mistake
after the fact) and I’m working to revise the contemporary YA so I can
query it. I’ve rewritten the entire ending of Evernow (gotta love
those characters who show up late and then change everything) and the
story is stronger than it’s ever been. It might not be ‘the one’ that
lands me an agent, but it’ll always be a huge one as far as my
development goes.
That’s the thing with writers. We never quite ever grow up, never
quite ever get to where we’re going, and we don’t really want to,
because that’s what writing is all about. A journey, an infinite
roadway that winds and dips, clings to cliff edges and breaches
mountaintops so high you can scrape your knuckles on the stars, and we
just keep building the road as we go, dragging our readers along with
us for the ride.
Now, no matter where you are in your writing journey, go find a pen,
some paper, someone’s arm, or a computer (if you must go techno on me) and write some more people! Write write write!
And never ever give up!
And then hit me up at my blog Grey Places
http://greyplaces.blogspot.com
or on Facebook username Artemis Grey
and tell me how you’re doing!
