Flatter Me With Insults
I have mentioned previously that I’ve written a novel-length story and last year was trying to shop it around. Now after having some friends and some book industry people read the first draft, I’m taking some of the comments to the keyboard and doing an entire rewrite which is actually kind of fun! Feedback is useful. Working in a vacuum isn’t necessarily the best way to go. It will take some time because it’s not priority (in other words, it’s not making me any money!) but it will get done and, I hope, eventually published.
A rather powerful fiction editor did me the favour of reading the first draft of Summer Camp and believe me, I was thrilled that he even read it all the way through. That doesn’t always happen! He sent me an email after the first couple of chapters, as promised, and told me he was hooked enough to finish it. That was high praise indeed from a man who gets buried in manuscripts and knows a thing or two about the book world. When he finished, he told me he really liked my writing and the tone of the story but that it was “chick lit” and he didn’t deal in “beach reads”. I nearly did cartwheels! He was attempting to criticise and perhaps even insult me a bit and I was thrilled that I had accomplished what I set out to do; to write a story that my sisters in novel reading would throw into a beach bag and read in the summer shade. To him, that was a deal breaker. To me, it was a huge compliment even as he told me he’d pass on publication.
The National Post’s Nathalie Atkinson wrote about this very subject on Monday; how so many books that are described as chick-lit or beach reads are actually written very well and get pigeon holed simply because they are written by women, about women and target women readers. Yeah, so? We’re not talking Harlequin Romances here (not that there’s anything wrong with them!) or Sex and the City rip-offs.
By women, about women and for women. That’s what I’ve written and many other aspiring authors inspired by the likes of The Devil Wears Prada and Bridget Jones’s Diaries have done. So sue us! Better yet, publish me, and I’ll show you how much fun and how lucrative it can be!
