Author Joanna Roddy

Check out the interview I did for Seattle Wrote blog!

Norelle Done at Seattle Wrote is doing great work to highlight local authors and create an online community. It doesn’t hurt that we have more than a few things in common, including where we went to university and spending our early married days living on Queen Anne hill in Seattle. I hope you spend some time on her site checking out some of the other great content there.

Thanks Norelle!

I am pleased to announce that I am now represented by Sally Harding of The Cooke Agency!

I met Sally at the Pacific Northwest Writers Association conference back in August. She was one of the agents in attendance, and while I wasn’t able to land an appointment with her during the conference, I had the luck to be seated next to her at the final awards dinner. My friend was being honored as a finalist in her category for the PNWA’s literary contest, and so we had an early seating with agents and editors (my friend took second place, by the way). Sally and I fell quickly into conversation that lasted through all three courses of dinner. I didn’t pitch my novel to her at the time, but before she left, she handed me her card and told me to send along my submission via her agency guidelines (4 pages + a query) and to mention we had sat next to one another at the conference.

Sally Harding

Before August was over, I  sent out 6 requested submissions to agents I had pitched to at the conference, and another 4 non-solicited queries to agencies I had my eye on. By October I had an offer from an agent, and I followed up with the agents I hadn’t heard from yet, including Sally. Sally hadn’t requested more material than the 4 pages I had originally sent to Cooke at that point, but called me back and offered to read the full manuscript quickly if I was still interested. A few days later, she called back and made an offer of representation.

[...]

This week I’m celebrating finishing my first pass of editing my manuscript! I thought I’d share my process of editing. And yes, it is a process. This might be my first pass, but I have several more to go. Here’s what I’ve done so far.

• I made a list with areas I thought needed more work. These involved thematic things like further descriptions of places, further development of themes, scenes that might need to be added, characters whose voices needed to be clarified, and narrative voice. I also noted grammatical/stylistic areas to look for: brevity, passive construction, redundancy, showing vs. telling, dangling modifiers, overuse of adverbs and adjectives, etc.

• I printed several copies of the manuscript. This was time consuming and a little spendy, but I wanted to have one hard copy for myself and a couple of extras for friends who had offered to read it and give feedback. [...]

*Mythmakers is a recurring post topic to highlight mythic storytellers

As I mentioned in my last post, Ursula Le Guin is the next mythmaker I’d like to highlight in this series. It helps that Hayao Miyazaki, my last mythmaker, was influenced by her and  Studio Ghibli made an anime film entitled Tales from Earthsea based on Le Guin’s work.

Ursula Le Guin has been writing wonderful fantasy for decades. A friend recommended her and I started reading her Earthsea series this spring. After having read the original quartet, I’m now on Tales from Earthsea, a book of short stories and Le Guin’s equivalent of Tolkein’s Silmarillion. [...]

I thought I’d give a little preview of my upcoming post for my Modern Mythmakers series, which will be about the fantasy writer Ursula Le Guin. I am currently reading her Earthsea series and am thoroughly captivated with it. Le Guin has come to mind as a perfect dovetail with my post about Miyazaki, since his son did an anime film inspired by Earthsea. And then, when I was reading the introduction to Tales From Earthsea (a collection of short stories), I was taken with the way Le Guin describes her process of researching and writing about a fictional world. In lieu of quietly tacking this onto my earlier post about research-driven writing, I decided to give it its own post.

I love how Le Guin makes the point that researching an imaginary history is not much different than researching actual history.

The way one does research into nonexistent history is to tell the story and find out what happened. I believe this isn’t very different from what historians of the so-called real world do. Even if we are present at some historic event, do we comprehend it–can we even remember it–until we can tell it as a story? And for events in times and places outside our own experience, we have nothing to go on but the stories other people tell us. Past events exist, after all, only in memory, which is a form of imagination. [...]

When you construct or reconstruct a world that never existed, a wholly fictional history, the research is of a somewhat different order, but the basic impulse and techniques are much the same. You look at what happens and try to see why it happens, you listen to what the people there tell you and watch what they do, you think about it seriously, and you try to tell it honestly, so that the story will have weight and make sense.

She goes on to explain how the ensuing books she wrote about Earthsea came to her like reports from a distant land. Reports that led to research, that in turn led to discovery, and finally to new stories.

I like this because it resonates with my own experience in the writing process. I need answers to my questions about the world I’m creating, and they can’t just be whatever I happen to come up with at the moment. I need to mine the vein of logic and see where it takes me. What a nice complement to that earlier post, isn’t it?

Look for my Le Guin Modern Mythmaker post next week!