Elizabeth F.: What to Expect When You're...On Submission

merci a www.sebastienlaban-photographe.com

When your agent tells you the names of the editors on your submission list, it’s a little like learning that you’re pregnant. Male authors should be sure to wallow in the experience, because it’s the closest they’ll come to understanding the personal bouleversement of that other state of “expecting.”

As soon as you hear the exciting news, you do what every expectant mother does: you go online and research the hell out of your condition. You read interviews of each editor, you look at their recent publications, and finally you ditch all decorum and stalk them on facebook.

And then you wait.

Forever.

Or so it seems. In fact, it’s such a small portion of your life that in Ordinary Time you would have blinked and wondered where those weeks went.

But when you’re pregnant you feel that baby inside you every moment of every day. The expectation weighs so constantly, you start to exhibit early signs of dementia. Where did you put your keys? What was the end of that sentence you just started? Why are nouns suddenly elusive? This causes impatience on the part of your loved ones. They spend approximately no time imagining what the baby looks like, calculating how much it weighs, and wondering whether it will arrive early. The baby amuses them, in small doses. If you talk about it once too often in a given day you will annoy the crap out of them.

Meanwhile, there are internal flips and amniotic hiccups and actual, distinguishable tiny feet pressed against your abdomen that heighten your anticipation to distraction. These are the bits of information that you cajole out of your agent: an editor met her at a cocktail party and loves it so far; another is sharing it with a colleague; it was slated for an editorial meeting, but they didn’t get to it in time. You try hard not to burn the dinner again, and you fail.

Eventually you hear that it has passed its first acquisitions meeting. Panic mixes with joy: this baby is happening to you. But your agent is in charge, and all you can do is work on a different manuscript, eat right, and elevate your legs when they swell.

The sale itself is dizzying: a mystical, euphoric agony that ends like Dorothy’s house thudding in Oz. Your husband pops open the champagne, your writing partners abuse exclamation points, your mother forgives you for ignoring her, and you, who anticipated this the most, are suddenly flummoxed.

In a few weeks the novelty and well-wishers are gone. Your baby is whole and miraculous, but also a little troll-like, you admit. Not to worry; you nurture it until the umbilical stump has fallen off and the facial acne has healed and it’s truly beautiful. This, after all, is your natural sphere: surrendering yourself to your work. You are far better at this than you are at waiting.

Sara: I love Middle grade

A while back I promised to talk about what middle grade novels appeal to me and what I look for in middle grade. I do work with less middle grade than YA, but not because I have any less love for it.

What I want to find when I begin a middle grade submission is not so different at all from what I want in a YA submission. I still want to find good prose, voice, plot, emotion, authenticity. In middle grade, though, I am mostly looking for contemporary stories. Not as a rule-- I did just take on a middle grade fantasy, but for the most part the books I love in the category are contemporary.

What I love about great middle grade is its ability to reveal the inner world of the protagonist and to be internal where YA is external. There are so many exceptions to any rule in fiction, and so many exceptions among books I love, but YA usually has an immediacy that middle grade does not always have because the character is still focused or even newly focused on who they are within their world and not yet as much on finding their place in the greater world. Where YA is driven so much by the protagonist and how they see the outside world, middle grade protagonists usually still see authority figures as the center of their worlds, and so their conflict is often coming to terms with and finding their place in that world. MG characters are often just discovering that authority figures are flawed, that their parents, their teachers, their older siblings are not always dependable. And, more simply, that they have opinions and wants separate from their family and some of their friends. They are figuring out what family means, and finding their unique place within their family or their group of friends.

They are questioning authority -- but authority figures still rule their world. What might be considered MGs limitations can actually allow for more complexities. Often they have adult characters who are just as compelling, and can show us a family in a more complete way than YA can. Where YA can be all about me, me, me, middle grade can show us the big picture of a small world.

I don't like it when I see that a plot has been oversimplified for the audience. Middle grade plots can be just as complex as YA plots, even if they are not always as dark. But often, they are dark. Lisa Schroeder's IT'S RAINING CUPCAKES is not something I would describe as dark, but the main character Isabel's mother is depressed, and its something that Isabel can feel and see, and that complicates her world and that also helps her to see things in her own way. In Kristen Tracy's CAMILLE MCPHEE FELL UNDER THE BUS, there is so much humor (another thing I adore in middle grade) but her parents are having problems in their marriage, and their issues are affecting everything else in Camille's life.

I am still suffering from a tired BEA trodden brain, and this list changes often, but if I had to give my favorite middle grade that is not a book I worked with right now, it would be THE VIEW FROM SATURDAY by E.L. Konigsburg. Please do write and then send me a book like this one. There is so much in this book- humor, mystery, family, secrets, baby turtles, a wedding, a tea party, and an Academic Bowl team called the Souls. But notice too that the teacher, Mrs. Olinski is a character as important to the story as the children.