We’re almost at the end of the first full month of summer, a fact that has me a little forlorn. I’m relishing the break from sports schedules, music practice, homework, and school projects. We’re spending more time watering the garden, trying out new crafts, and perfecting the habitat for the frogs (four of the twelve survived metamorphosis). We’ve also fit in one camping trip so far and hope to squeeze in one more before our epic Banff camping trip at the end of July (pray we won’t be camping in the snow).

What I’m Working On:

If you follow me on Instagram you may have seen that I finally finished the massive rewrite of The Second Greatest Thief in New York. I’m feeling a bit like Frodo at the moment:

Final stats: I deleted 20,000 words, wrote 26,000 new words, and changed almost every scene in some substantial way. I’m enormously pleased with the result. The biggest changes involved expanding the world (almost every agent I spoke with said they wanted to see more there), changing the relationship between Lyra and her father (who is now her brother), giving her best friend a personality facelift (my agent astutely pointed out that he wasn’t different enough from Lyra to make their relationship have the sparks it needed), and lightening the tone (raise your hand if you’re surprised that I wrote something too dark, whoops).

After finishing the rewrite, I sent it to a beta reader (shout-out to Ande). She read it in record time and gave some fantastic notes. None of her suggestions required much work (thank goodness), and all of them were legitimate concerns, mostly about how much/little information I’d provided (I am now too close to the story to know how it comes across to a first-time reader). This is the most intricate story I’ve written so far, and I needed to know what elements I hadn’t seeded enough or had hinted at too much. So, I cranked out those smaller edits in a few days.

On Thursday evening, minutes before we left on our camping trip, I sent the revised manuscript off to my agent. Cue me collapsing to the floor in a puddle of relief. Now, I’m waiting to hear her thoughts on any big picture tweaks we need to make before I start combing through it on a line level. We haven’t decided when we’ll send it out to editors yet, it all depends on how she thinks this rewrite went. I’ll keep you posted!

What I’m Reading:

This month I kept busy reading many students’ words for the MFA residency week. I did manage to fit in one non-fiction called Judgment of the Nephilim. I didn’t agree with all his arguments or conclusions, but there was plenty of fascinating biblical support that made it impossible to read the Old Testament the same way again.

I also read Moo by Sharon Creech, a story told in a blend of poetry and prose. It’s a quick and endearing read with some great turns of phrase and plenty of heart.

Writing Tip:

I talk with my students a lot about pay-offs, particularly emotional pay-offs, and how you need to earn the big moments in your story. There are a lot of ways to approach this, but one of the rules I try to follow is: a protagonist’s “happy ending” should be commensurate to the amount of pain you’ve put her through.

There are, of course, exceptions, and this rule is possibly more applicable in children’s fiction, but it’s fairly obvious if you think about it. Let’s say you have a child whose parents have been trapped in another space/time prison, and he spends the whole story desperately trying to get them back. Imagine if, at the end, he doesn’t get his parents back, but he does win first place in the Spelling Bee.

Agents would be nonplussed. Editors would be bewildered. Readers would be annoyed. Who cares, everyone would say. He’s an orphan with a cheap ribbon. Big whoop. You promised a reunion or, at the least, some sort of found family instead. You need to deliver on that promise.

I thought about this rule recently when I finished listening to James and the Giant Peach with my son. James, whose parents were eaten by a rhinoceros, who had to go live with his abusive aunts, who was starved and beaten and abandoned, ends the story with more friends than he could have ever wished for. That, I thought to myself, was a very satisfying ending for that lonely boy.

Some cold souls might complain that it’s too happy of an ending, but because of how much grief Roald Dahl put his main character through, we were ready and willing to accept it.

That’s it for June, see you in July!

Christine