Dream Chaser

by Beth

I'm back from DC and loved spending time with my fellow Banditas, BBs and other writing friends I only get to see once a year. I miss you all already! I especially enjoyed taking my niece Blaire with me to the RITA/GH awards ceremony. Blaire, sweetheart that she is, said afterwards that she wished she could've seen me accept my GH when I won two years ago which reminded me of how far of I'd come since my first National Conference.

I attended my first RWA National Conference in 2002 in Denver. Having never been to National before I was excited, nervous, and a bit overwhelmed. I’d completed one book and had attended a regional conference the year before but being at National, surrounded by so many aspiring authors, published authors and editors and agents was thrilling. I attended as many workshops as I could, taking copious notes and soaking up the information my fellow authors so generously shared. I met many new people, some of whom have since become dear friends. I saw some of my favorite authors in the hall and in the bar. I even got to sit in the reserved seats at the RITA/Golden Heart ceremony. Oh, not because I’d finaled in either contest--heck, at that time I didn’t even know what either award was about--but because the published author who’d generously sponsored the conference scholarship I’d won was up for a RITA. And since she couldn’t attend, who did she ask to accept on her behalf should her name be called?

Me.

For those who know me, the situation was laughable to say the least. I’m what you might call…unassuming. Quiet. Watchful. And definitely not someone who’s comfortable accepting an award in front of two thousand people. Unfortunately, my benefactor didn’t win that night so I didn’t have to leave my seat. A fact for which my nerves were mighty grateful, but by the end of the night, after watching so many talented, gracious women accept their awards, my viewpoint changed and I was certain of one very surprising fact:

I wanted to be up on that stage. And I wanted to be up there accepting my own award.

So, naturally, I did what anyone would do in my situation. I wrote a book (my second) and entered it in the next year’s Golden Heart contest. It didn’t final. Neither did either of my two entries a year later. Or the year after that. I wrote more. I revised. I entered chapter contests and seriously considered each and every comment given. I found some fabulous critique partners. Most important of all, I found my voice. And I entered the Golden Heart once again.

That year I was lucky enough to be a double finalist in the GH. I had a blast at the National conference in Atlanta, meeting my fellow finalists for the first time, proudly wearing my GH ribbons and buttons. I joined The Golden Network and attended their wonderful dessert reception and famed Boot-Out ceremony as well as their informative retreat. There was a champagne reception for both RITA and GH finalists, rehearsals and finally, awards night.

I honestly didn’t expect to win and therefore didn’t experience more than a twinge of disappointment when my name wasn’t called. After all, it was an honor just to final and I was determined not to be eligible for the GH again. I was ready to sell.

Yeah, I hear you all laughing out there.

I knew it didn’t really matter that I was ready to sell, what mattered was that an editor was ready to buy me (or in this case, my story). But I thought my story was good. Really good. Alas, while the editor I was working with agreed my story was good, it wasn’t good enough to buy.

Not one to let a bit of bad news get me down, I forged ahead, entered the 2007 GH, and hoped like the dickens that lightening really could strike the same place twice. It did.

With that third final came the same excitement as the year before, along with healthy doses of relief, gratitude and, to be honest, a sense of validation that perhaps I was going in the right direction after all. I truly thought that this story, a story I’d worked so hard on, a story I’d received an eight page revision letter for, a story that had been sent up to the senior editor with a recommendation to buy, was THE ONE.

And then, a week before this year‘s conference, I was rejected.

It hurt. Oh, did it hurt. But, since rejections are a part of this business, I didn’t let it get me down (the hot fudge sundae I had for supper that night helped too). Instead, I focused on making this conference the best ever. I was going to network and take workshops and enjoy being a finalist. Like the other year I'd finaled, I met my fellow finalists, enjoyed the retreats and receptions and even had a productive meeting with the editor I’ve been working with these past few years.

I was inspired by stories of authors who wrote for five, ten or even twenty years before selling. Awed by their persistence, determined to achieve my own success and unable to imagine doing anything else but writing, I vowed to work harder, write better and to never give up.

But by Saturday, the combination of too little down time and way too little sleep caught up with me. Mid-afternoon, I sat down waiting for a friend when the doubts hit. What if I was fooling myself? What if I never sold? How many times will I be able to push on after the door’s been slammed in my face again?

It was pitiful. I was pitiful. And I hate being pitiful.

That night at the award’s ceremony, I had no hopes of winning. So when the presenter announced my title and my name, I was shocked, humbled, and a bit breathless from the bear hug Tawny gave me. I learned I can speak in front of 2,000 people and not make a total fool of myself. A partial fool, maybe, but not a total fool. Back at my seat, staring down at my shiny new Golden Heart necklace, I knew I would defeat those pesky doubts that had invaded my brain earlier in the day. Not because being a GH finalist or winner guarantees I’ll get published, but because I realized that no matter how hard this career might be, no matter how disappointing, I don’t want to do anything else.

My GH win gave me a boost, an ego stroke if you will, and the realization that while I was still anxious, maybe even a bit impatient to sell, I needed to take the time to appreciate the steps along the way.

A month later, I received The Call for that GH winning book. And the rest, as they say, is history :-)

But I learned to celebrate my successes and mourn my failures (for short amounts of time). And I’ll never stop writing, believing or dreaming.

How about you? What dreams have you achieved?

The Vision Thing

by Nancy

An article in the newspaper reminded me that tomorrow, July 20, is the 40th anniversary of the moon landing. I remember seeing Neil Armstrong step down onto the surface of our planet's nearest neighbor. Even then, with my scifi geekdom in the budding stage, I thought this was way cool. And what took us there was vision. Imagination. The ability to see beyond "can't" to "could" and then "is." A wonderful book about the power of vision to transform one's life is October Sky by Homer Hickam, which became the moving film Rocket Boys, starring Jake Gillenhaal and Chris Cooper. The New York Times quoted Frank Borman as saying that if the moon landing had been more about vision and less about rocks, the space program might've made great strides in the interim. That's probably debatable, but for me, it was always about the vision thing.


Last night, RWA honored its RITA and GH finalists, writers whose visions touched the hearts of judges. They saw what characters "could" be and do, who mined the human potential for love and turned the ore into stories of triumph over emotional pain. As I write this, a week before you'll read it, I don't know who the winners are (will be? were?). On behalf of all the banditas, however, I congratulate them and the finalists. Not everyone can win, but everyone can sell and ascend the bestseller lists, and I wish all of you the best of luck.

The space program and the awards ceremony each resulted from careful planning and a lot of effort, albeit of different types. Sometimes, though, "stuff happens," as the saying goes, and leads to amazing results.




One example of such serendipity is the career of Greg Mortenson. His memoir, Three Cups of Tea, has been on the New York Times bestseller list for two and a half years. I attribute this success to the vision of positive change the book offers.


An experienced mountaineer, Mortenson set out to climb K2 in the Himalayas as a memorial to his deceased sister. His climb ended prematurely when a companion developed altitude sickness. Mortenson and another man carried him down the mountain, a trek that left Mortenson in rough shape as well. Disoriented and sick, he wandered away from his group and stumbled into a remote village in Pakistan. The people there took him in, fed him, and put him to bed. When he recovered, they showed him around their village. One of the things he saw was a circle of village children in a field, doing their lessons together--outside because they had no school and together because they had no teacher. And he realized building a school for these children would be a much better memorial to his sister than climbing a mountain.

Getting the school built did turn out to be a steep climb. No one with influence had ever heard of him, and raising money proved to be very difficult. But he did succeed in building the school, for girls as well as boys. As the building neared completion, people from a neighboring village arrived to ask if he'd build a school for them, too. One school led to another and another until building schools in that part of the world became his life's work. A failed effort to climb a mountain led to a vision of what could be and a step forward for some of the world's poorest people.

Two hundred thirty-three years ago, a handful of men in Philadelphia dared to challenge the world's greatest empire and most powerful navy. As Abraham Lincoln said at Gettysburg, they "brought forth a new nation, one founded in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal." As a society, we don't always live up to that ideal, but it's out there as a model, something for us to strive toward. A vision. Granted, those early patriots had help from France, which never missed a chance to bedevil England in those days, but the vision was theirs, and it was so powerful that a French marquis (Lafayette), a German baron (von Steuben), and a Polish count (Pulaski) sailed over to help lead the army. It remains so powerful that Independence Hall is a World Heritage site and people from all over the planet come to see it.



Lucretia Mott, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and the other women at Seneca Falls, NY, in 1848 had a vision of women controlling their own earnings, making their own decisions as to whether to work outside the home and, most important, helping to choose their nation's leaders. That same vision propelled Martin Luther King's efforts for racial equality and shaped his stirring "I Have a Dream" speech, one of the jewels of American rhetoric. As a result, African Americans count as "whole" people instead of 2/3 in the census, and all Americans of legal age can vote.





Vision doesn't just apply to national affairs but to entertainment and daily life as well. Imagination and science together gave us refrigerators and vacuum cleaners and artificial joints, among other things. An electronics salesman from Germany, Hugo Gernsbeck, was among the first to imagine television. Gernsbeck believed science would produce a utopian world. In his 1920s electronics catalogues, he featured various products and wrote commentaries on their potential. He coined the term "scienti-fiction," which became "science fiction," and helped create fandom via his magazine Amazing Stories. The SFWA Hugo award is named for him. Amazing Stories was most popular among geeky boys, possibly including two kids from Cleveland, Ohio, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster. And if you're a true geek, you know that Siegel and Shuster created Superman and spawned a comic book genre beloved by millions around the globe.

Walt Disney looked at the potential for electronics differently, applying it to sound recording and animated movies. He believed in it so strongly that he sold his car to pay for re-recording the sound on his landmark cartoon, Steamboat Willie. A visit to Coney Island, which was then declining in popularity, convinced him there was an appetite for rides and imaginative entertainment, especially if delivered by cheerful staff in a clean environment, and he shared Gernsbeck's belief in technology as a way to deliver a better life. Exhibits in Tomorrowland still explore that possibility.

Those exhibits rely on computer technology, which owes many of its advances to two geeky kids who rose from obscurity to become gurus of the computer world--Bill Gates of Microsoft and Steve Jobs of Apple. We can argue about evil empires and overpriced gadgets, but vision carried both of these men to the top of their field and provides convenience (along with occasional bewilderment and frustration) to millions of people.

Another business icon frequently mocked is Martha Stewart. We the homemaking-challenged don't relate very well to Martha but can still admire her talent. She realized there was a market for ways to make life easier or prettier or tastier and built an empire showing people how to create gorgeous lifestyles. She offered a vision of a nicer, more comfortable life that many people loved. Everyone now marketing homemaking product lines, magazines, and cookbooks is following in Martha's footsteps.

Also mocked despite booming business is romance fiction. If you've watched some of the YouTube videos about romance succeeding in the economic downturn, you may have shared my desire to send a really muscular, well-armed hero or kick-ass heroine to have a word or two with the TV people. But not everyone sees romance as something to apologize for. In 1980, 37 writers shared a vision about romance and came together to form an organization supporting a genre the world at large dissed. And still does. In Houston, Texas, Romance Writers of America was born. And here we all are, as the saying goes, in or trying to be in the business of romance.

Two business owners from Ohio achieved something that changed the way people travel. At Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, Orville and Wilbur Wright doggedly pursued a vision dating back to Da Vinci and beyond, the idea that human beings might fly. One December day in 1903, their glider "slipped the surly bonds of Earth," as RCAF Flight Officer James Gillespie Magee expressed it, for 12 seconds. Aviation was born. Climbing the hill to the Wright Brothers memorial requires fighting high winds all the way. Sand blows from the beach and the dunes, a stinging bombardment at times. The National Park Service site is a great place to fly a kite if the opportunity arises, just FYI. Dealing with that wind demonstrates why the Wrights found Kitty Hawk so suitable for gliders.

North Carolina and Ohio battle over who can legitimately claim to be "first in flight" and "birthplace of aviation," as our license plates state, with Ohioans noting that the flight took place at Kitty Hawk but a lot of the groundwork was done in Dayton, at the Wrights' bicycle shop. There's a replica of the 1903 glider at Kitty Hawk, but the original is in the Smithsonian. I hope to see it between the time I write this and you read it. Pieces of wood and fabric from the original plane went to the moon with the Apollo 11 astronauts.

And that little factoid brings this blog full circle. What visionaries do you admire? Who looked beyond "don't" and "can't" to "could" and then to "is?"

I'm traveling today and hope to be home mid-to-late afternoon. So be please don't think I'm ignoring your comments. I promise I'll respond as soon as I can. I'm giving away a package of books, which I can't name because I don't have them at the time I'm writing this, from RWA to one commenter today.

Guilty Pleasures

by Susan Seyfarth

So something really extraordinary happened to me yesterday. I got fan mail. Sort of.

I'm what we call an AYU in this business: an As Yet Unpublished. This makes it tough to get fan mail. (It also makes it tough to get hate mail, so there's the silver lining, I guess.) Anyway, one of the women who judged my manuscript Money, Honey for this year's Golden Heart contest emailed to say she'd been pulling for it to final because she'd loved reading the partial so much. This just blew me away. First because, wow, what a nice thing to say. But second because nobody was ever supposed to love Money, Honey but me.

Without going into a lot of excruciating detail, let's just say that I wrote MH during a particularly difficult phase of my life & as a result, the book is a little...um...dark. It's not full of serial killers or child molesters or dog kickers or anything like that. Heaven forfend. It's just got a really broody, pessimistic, emotionally closed off hero with a well-deserved criminal record. He's hot as hell, yes, but good boyfriend material? Warm & fuzzy? Fully reformed & legitimately employed? Not so much. He's difficult. Prickly. Dangerous. And maybe not in a good way.

And the heroine? Well. I gave her a backstory so viciously complicated & emotionally scarring that even my amazingly supportive critique partner said, "She can't have lived through that & turned out even remotely normal."

Did I listen? Did I fix things? I did not. I wrote the damn book my own damn way & sent it off to the contest circuit where it got duly slaughtered. I shoved it under the bed where it belonged & figured I'd written the fabled Book of My Heart. You know the one that nobody will ever love but you, but you're somehow compelled to write anyway? The story you're longing to tell that has absolutely no commercial viability?

When Money, Honey hit the finals, I was stunned. It was like the universe had suddenly decided to reward me for indulging my quirks instead of sending the Rejection Express steaming through my mailbox every day. This was unprecedented. I ought to go nuts while the window of opportunity was open, right? So I started thinking about things I secretly enjoy that I don't widely publicize. I polled my friends about their guilty pleasures. I quizzed my family. Here (in no particular order & without attribution to protect the innocent) is what I discovered we love but won't necessarily admit to:

1) Smokin' hot anti-heros with a razor-sharp edge. Doesn't hurt if they're really, really rich & just the tiniest bit cruel. Remember James Spader from Pretty in Pink? Yummers. (Okay, I'll admit it. That one's mine.)

2) Wine Coolers. Hello, high school. And yet, on a really hot summer's evening? Admit it--a Bartles & Jaymes can go down pretty smooth.

3) Cheap Trick/Journey. This was a two way tie . I mean, come on. We all love these bands but nobody will own up to it. Sure, we all crank up the volume when we stumble across their songs on the radio, but who'll admit to having the CD in the car? (Okay, I will. I love me some Cheap Trick.)

4) Trash TV. A show called "Plastic Surgery: Before & After" seemed to come up in conversation a lot. Wife Swap came up pretty often, too. I haven't seen these ones, but I have a well publicized addiction to People magazine & Perez Hilton's celebrity gossip site, so I have no room to act superior. People also admitted to loving Las Vegas, various soap operas, 90210 & Dawson's Creek. (That last one was mine. I'm not ashamed. I loved Pacey.)

5) Insulting good food with cheap condiments. Tartar sauce on a $50 fish filet at a fancy restaurant. Mayo on fries. Ketchup on steak. I'll admit to a predilection for cheap ice cream. You can keep your Ben & Jerry's. Hang on to your Haagen Daaz. Scoop me up a big fat bowl of plain ol' vanilla from a $3 family sized tub. Squirt on the Hershey's & I'm there.

So how about you? If the universe really IS rewarding us this week for indulging our private quirks, now isn't the time to hold back! What do you love that you hide? And reading romance doesn't count. Not in the Lair. :-)

Of Golden Hearts, Golden Ladies, and Grungy Guys

by Nancy Northcott

This is a big month for some people in RWA. The calls go out in late March to the finalists in the Golden Heart ("GH") and RITA contests. The people who're most relaxed on the designated calling day are the ones who don't have a horse in either race. Those who do cope with it in various ways--sitting by the phone, avoiding the phone, watching hungrily for posts online, checking occasionally, or avoiding RWA email loops altogether. Or eating chocolate. When all is said and done, though, some people are going to be very, very happy while others are going to be very, very disappointed, with a bunch in between.

Having a little perspective helps us deal with any exciting success or stinging disappointment. When it comes to contests, I like to remember the wise and gifted writer, J. R. R. Tolkien (which may clue you in to which grungy guy we're going to be discussing). In The Fellowship of the Ring, the hobbits meet Strider at the Sign of the Prancing Pony in Bree. He then takes them into the wild, protecting them from the black riders. Tolkien includes, later, a poem about Strider that starts, "All that is gold does not glitter." And so it is with manuscripts and books.

Finaling in the GH will not, contrary to what some entrants think, sell a book. It gives the author exposure, which she (or he) needs to be ready to use to advantage. Finaling in the RITA will not catapult an author up the publishing house ladder. As Joan comments, finaling in the GH is an honor that helps "validate and nourish the frustrated writer's soul." The same would go for the RITA. Neither is, however, the secret elixir. Ask any bandita. Anyone who judges these contests can tell you that fabulous books, every year, don't make that final few. It doesn't take much to keep one out, and a lot depends on how the book strikes its randomly allotted judges. So a book that finals really wowed its judges. We should all celebrate that.

The RITA, of course, is a golden statue of a woman seated and writing. It's gorgeous. I think it's safe to say we all want one someday. Several banditas have the Golden Heart pendant (not shown at right, but this resembles the pins RWA gives finalists for their name badges). They're also gorgeous. And the nice thing about the GH is that while only one person can win, more than one can have a manuscript requested by an editor or agent judge. And everybody has the option to dress up for the ceremony.

Which brings me, at last, to the grungy guy. Tolkien's Strider appears to be a woodsman. He doesn't look much like what he is, Aragorn, Dunedin and rightful King of the West. The poem speaks, in beautiful word images, about strength not withering and about the fact that wandering doesn't mean you're lost. So it is with the quest for success in any creative endeavor. Success requires the strength to persevere. Wandering, which is often signposted with rejection, is an opportunity to develop the skills that make grasping success possible.

Good luck to everyone with a horse in the March RWA races!

How do you deal with waiting for contest results? In what endeavor have you had to persevere? Have you ever felt that you're wandering in the wilderness while others find the success you seek? How do you keep going?

Soon-to-be-published bandita and bibliophile mystery author Kate Carlisle shares this photo from the night Gemma Halliday presented her with the Golden Heart for the Novel With Strong Romantic Elements category. Congratulations and thanks for sharing, Kate!