WRITE ON

The intrepid Captain James Hook continues to win readers, out on the cyber seas!

Last month, I was contacted by the lovely Clare Moore of the online mag, Ampersand Literary.

 She had just read Alias Hook, and invited me to do a Q&A for her site, which publishes fiction, poetry, photography, and artwork, along with occasional interviews with the purveyors thereof.

I was thrilled to do it, and the post is up online as of today!

Clare generously invited me to blather on at great length about Alias Hook and my upcoming Beast novel. But she also quizzed me about the writing process itself, my completely chaotic publishing history, and any tips I might have for emerging writers.

It was a fun interview to do. And while you're there, surf around this diverse, eclectic site devoted to the creative process!

BREATHLESS

Well, so much for the hurry-up-and-wait phase of my career as a Real Author. This week has been nothing if not action-packed! As the Red Queen tells Alice, it takes all the running you can do to stay in the same place. if you want to get somewhere else, you must run twice as fast!

So what has me all breathless and excited this week? On Sunday morning, I heard from my editor at Thoms Dunne Books that the audiobook rights to Alias Hook had been sold to Blackstone Audio. Yippee!

 That was great! But I also found in my inbox a note from the very high-profile and respected NYC literary agent Irene Goodman. She had just finished reading an ARC of Alias Hook, loved it, and said although she was sure I must be ably represented by now, if not, might I please keep her in mind?

Anyone who has had to suffer through my endless monologues on my attempts to interest literary agents in any of my various projects can imagine what a shock it was to have an agent of this caliber querying me!

And I thought I never got any interesting email on the weekends!

On Tuesday, the team at TDB forwarded me a very nice review of Alias Hook from Library Journal, which read, in part:

"Scintillating description and deep characterization make Jensen's Neverland a psychologically intriguing place to visit. Jensen offers a humanized take on Captain Hook that will be sure to entertain fans of the fairy tale-retelling genre."

On Wednesday, my editor sent me a fabulous jacket blurb written for Alias Hook by author Elizabeth Blackwell. Her new novel, While Beauty Slept, is a re-imagined retelling of the Sleeping Beauty fairy tale. (See, I'm not the only one who comes up with these crack-brained ideas!)

Here's her blurb:

"A captivating blend of fantasy, adventure and historical fiction, Alias Hook is a fresh, utterly convincing reinterpretation of the Peter Pan story. Lisa Jensen takes a classic villain and transforms him into someone we care about and root for all the way to the emotionally stirring end. You will never look at Captain Hook the same way again!"

Thanks, Elizabeth!

And this morning, I awoke to find my mug shot grinning out at me from the cover of the SC Sentinel (okay, I was below the fold, but still...), teasing a story Wallace Baine wrote on me in his excellent new book-related column Read Or Die in The Guide.

All I would add is that my upcoming reading/signing at Bookshop Santa Cruz has been rescheduled to Wednesday, July 16. (My bad for giving Wallace outdated info.) Also, this photo of me, used in the story, was taken by the fabulous and talented Jana Marcus.

Oh, and did I mention that on Monday, the inestimable Irene Goodman called me up to offer me representation? Of course, I said "yes" in about 2.8 seconds. Sure, most authors find an agent first and THEN get a book deal, but, hey, I'm not complaining. And she's already reading my next book!

Calloo! Callay!

LIFE in the SADDLE

Oh no: writing the book is JUST the beginning!

The good news is that beyond-fabulous review Alias Hook got Monday morning in Publisher's Weekly, the official, non-denominational Bible of the publishing industry.

(What, you missed it? Scroll down—you're not getting off that easily! This is a big deal.)

The bad news? I've hardly been out of the cockpit of my computer command module since.

Besides posting the review to every virtual cork board I could think of, and fielding congratulations and good wishes from my generous friends, readers, and supporters, I've started getting phishing-type emails from businesses wanting to sign me up for their services.

Like the email with the tantalizing subject: "Film/TV rights" (what, Spielberg is calling already?) which turns out to be an invitation to list any available rights to my book on their website. Or the form letter from a NYC publicity firm hoping to enroll me as a client.

Also, handing out ARCs, one book at a time!

Meanwhile, my real-life PR team at Thomas Dunne Books (who are doing a bang-up job, btw; how do you think I got the PW review?) are making all sorts of interesting suggestions—like a 1000-word essay to be pitched to the Author's Note page in the (ulp!) New York Times Book Review. Daunting? You bet. But I've hammered out two-thirds of it so far, and it may not be entirely moronic. Not sure yet. We'll see...

Still, all of this comes not two weeks after I had just start noodling around with an idea for a brand new fiction project. Which brings the grand total of current works in progress (WIPs) up to three. In various stages of completion, from fledgling, wraith-like idea, to half-a-novel-in-search-of-a-plot, to within spitting (maybe gasping) distance of the finish line.

Not to mention two more complete manuscripts ready to be unleashed on an unsuspecting public—as soon as I can find an agent who loves them as much as I do.

But, hey: One book at a time. That's our mantra here at the Fiction Addiction Help Center.


(PS: Like Alias Hook of Facebook and I'll be your BFF!)

COASTING ON FUMES

The wheels of publishing turn slowly.

Whoever coined the phrase "hurry up and wait" must have been thinking of the publishing industry. Not that I'm not thrilled with my adventures in publishing so far, but if instant gratification is your goal, better get yourself another gig.

The lead time between making your initial First Contact—assuming you're fortunate enough to snag the interest of an agent or editor after weeks (or months, or years) of seemingly fruitless queries—and the time that something actually begins to happen on the agenting or editing front can be eternal.

First comes the high of an Industry Professional liking your book, which is pretty much unparalleled in the annals of human delight. Soak it in while you can! Because over the next several months, you'll be coasting on fumes.

 In 2007, I started querying agents with an early draft of Alias Hook. (Well, I thought it was a final draft at the time.) Three agents were interested enough to read it, two of whom worked with me extensively on subsequent revisions, but by the end of 2011, I still had no agent, or prospects.

In January of 2012, while sending out a batch of new, freshly rewritten agent queries, I sent the AH ms in toto to Snowbooks in the UK, an indie publisher famed not only for genre niche-marketing (fantasy, horror, steampunk), but for not requiring authors to submit to them through an agent. And then I went back to my life, figuring that, like all the agents I'd been querying lately, I would simply never hear back from them again.

Which I didn't for seven month—until the end of July, when I received the email authors dream of: Snowbooks was "in love with" Alias Hook and wanted to publish it!

Because SB is a small press, things happened pretty quickly after that, by publishing standards. I was sending out blurb requests in September, and my book had a gorgeous cover (gold foil, yet!) by the end of the month. By November, I was formatting my final edit. Still, it was May before the finished book arrived on shelves in the UK.

For those of you keeping score at home, that's about nine months from acceptance of the ms to finished book—and that's under the speediest possible circumstances. As a point of reference, Art Boy can complete a painting in 2-3 weeks and move on to the next project. I feel like such a slacker!

Meanwhile, in January of 2013, I had a phone call from Pete Wolverton, Associate Editor at Thomas Dunne Books, a division of St. Martin's Press in the States. We spoke for 20 minutes, at the end of which time, he told me he would be making an offer for the rights to publish a US edition of Alias Hook.

Callou! Callay! Based on his sound advice, I blithely wrote a spanking new one-page prologue to set up my story; I figured we'd be starting the revision any minute! I spent two days filling out an official Author's Questionnaire from TDB, and I was checking my email constantly for news of those revision notes Pete was going to send me, or the contract with SB. And checking, and checking...

The contract between the UK and US publishing houses was not officially signed, sealed, and delivered until September. Yup, another nine months later. Pete's notes finally began arriving in my inbox in October. Happily for me, 85-90% of his suggestions were right on, and the rest were negotiable. The entire editing process only took us about two weeks—once we finally got to it.

Adavance Reading Copies (ARCs) of Alias Hook are going out to meet the press as we speak. But, the US edition originally planned for a Spring 2014 release, has now been repositioned to July. (The better to bring it out with a bang, my new publicist at TDB tells me.) Still, it hasn't exactly been a sprint to the finish line. That heavy breathing you hear is me trying to coax a little more mileage out of those fumes!

READERS, WRITERS, & HIRED GUNS

I'm concerned about the state of writing here in the new millennium. Not only my own writing, which obsesses me quite enough, thank you, or the scary prospects for the future of writing and reading in the text-and-tweet society. I'm mostly worried about the ways writers and readers are and are no longer being served by traditional publishing, once the principal venue for getting the written word into the hands of the reading public.

Over on the writers' website, Red Room, their book editor-in-residence, Alan Rinzler, recently posted an informative blog advising new writers how to find and choose a freelance editor-for-hire. It reads a lot like the advice writers used to be given for finding an agent to rep their work to a publisher: check out references (if any) and credentials, talk to other authors who have worked with the potential editor, try to find out if his or her work habits and creative vision mesh with your own. Rinzler goes on to invoke the sainted memory of Maxwell Perkins, the editor at Charles Scribner's Sons publishing house in the early 20th Century whose dedication and expertise helped to midwife the work of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and Thomas Wolfe (in particular, the mighty behemoth that would become Look Homeward Angel) into literary classics.

But it seems to me the crucial difference between the Maxwell Perkins era and our own is that Perkins was actually employed by Scribner's to nurture its authors. This was back in the day when a publisher would take on a promising new writer and team him or her up with a simpatico in-house editor to develop the writer's career.

These days, new writers who are still learning their craft are also expected to somehow locate and purchase the services of a freelance editor (and just trust to the Force thy can find a good, or even competent one, judging from the experiences of other writers responding to Rinzler's post) before they've made one dime off their writing. And all this before they've even landed an agent—let alone a publisher. A hired-gun of an editor who may or may not be invested in developing the writer's career over the long haul.

Would Perkins and Wolfe have had such a prolonged, profound, and productive relationship if Perkins had been an editor-for-hire paid for out of Wolfe's own (threadbare) pocket?

Here's my other question: if books are pre-edited before they even get to the agent, and arrive at a publishing house camera-ready, as it were, what is it that editors at publishing houses do all day, if they're not editing books? I'm just asking.