Personal blog of christian
writer & fallible mom
Katy McKenna Raymond
in Kansas City, Missouri
Katy is represented by
Greg Johnson at
WordServe Literary
Read more Katy at
LateBoomer.net
Recent Posts
- Try
- Becoming Brenda Starr
- Off Beat
- Scattered
- That’s It
- So I’ve Finally Signed With An Agent. Now What?
- The Spoon
- Sciatica
- Sweetheart
- A Woman’s Train of Thought Has No Caboose
- However much we own, we are all still living on borrowed time
- After all, when restaurants shrink portions, they don’t shrink prices.
- As with everything in life, balance is key.
- Slow down, you move too fast…
- Yeah, I know. I have issues.
Syndicate
E me at katy @ ngenius.com
Catching Up Again, Or Still?
I’ll tell you what: If things could be any nuttier over here, I don’t know how.
Since May, when the hail storm from hades wrecked the outside of our house, Doug and I have practically hosted Construction Guys around the clock. I am happy to report that the repairs are almost done—-only tiny details remain. But MAN did this remind me of how I did not love the process of building our home, which we moved into fifteen years ago. I actually don’t mind the myriad of minuscule decisions (or the big ones, either). I think what gets to me is the noise level and the mistakes.
If a company tries to tell you that they’ll act as the general contractor for the job so that you can go about the business of your regular daily lives, DON’T believe them. I can’t tell you how many days the supervisor showed up for his minutes-long visit only to have to inform the crew that they’d need to tear out half a day’s work. We ended up being on-site gen contractors for this job, and probably saved the company thousands of dollars in labor and materials by catching the mistakes as they BEGAN to occur, instead of many hours into the job.
The insurance company agreed to pay the contractors a set amount, so I don’t know why I had to be so darned co-dependent about it. Maybe if the contractors realized how much time and money they were losing by having to tear stuff out and start over, they’d change their methods. But, NO….I have to point out problems, inform them they are installing materials we did not order, point out that the gorgeous Amish-made front door is WARPED (my vision is 20/400, and I had no difficulty spotting this from across the room, but they argued with me until the super arrived and measured and eyeballed and measured again and said I was right….), question them about what constitutes a mitered edge and what does NOT, etc.
Anyway, we didn’t save ourselves a cent by acting as gens, but you know? Somebody has to do it!
These past couple of weeks, we’ve had a hundred family events, too, culminating on Friday, when my wonderful son Scott and his beautiful wife Brooke moved from Kansas City to Austin, Texas. Can I get a major Boo-Hoo here? Seriously, O fallible ones! Two out of my three kids have moved away in the past six weeks. I’m sorry, but no matter how old the kids and how old the parents, it’s still hard. That’s not to say I don’t believe these moves will be good for my children—-I fully realize they will. It just stings, that’s all. But we deal, right? And we trust.
Now I’m getting ready to go to the annual conference of American Christian Fiction Writers in Denver. I’ll get to see my agent Rachelle Gardner there, plus SO MANY of my wonderful writer friends. Donald Maass, an acclaimed New York agent and author of “Writing the Break-out Novel” will be teaching an all day class in which the attendees get a chance to apply his methods to our works-in-progress. I can’t wait!
I had a private meeting with Mr. Maass at the Calvin Festival of Faith and Writing some years back. He read a sample of my work (I’d written exactly one novel scene in my entire life, and that’s what I showed him!) and gave me enough encouragement that he became my BFF. Honestly, I am thrilled for the opportunity to learn from him!
While we’re on the subject, no, my first novel (My Lawful Wedded Life) hasn’t yet found a publishing home. My agent sent out the book out to a number of publishers in February. Not everyone has responded (these things can take forever), but of those who did, we realized that the state of the economy did not help acquiring editors want to take a chance on a new novelist.
At any rate, I’ve had to move on psychologically. Work is well underway on the next novel, and I’m really excited about it. This time, instead of seat-of-the-pants (SOTP) writing, in which I do NOT plot or plan or outline or have a synopsis or have developed character profiles, I am doing pretty much the opposite.
What if it turns out that I am not a SOTP girl at all? What if I am a Plotter and just didn’t know it? So far, even though doing it this way obviously takes a LOT more work upfront, I am feeling so much more confidence that I’ve got a story in front of me, with compelling motivated characters, all ready to tell. What a relief to have something of an Authorial GPS System! I am fairly certain there will still be plenty of room for me to exercise my freewheeling, spontaneous side when I sit down to write. Outlines are made to be changed, right?
Once the conference is behind me, I’ll be full steam ahead on this new novel. Maybe it will be the first to sell, who knows? This whole publishing game takes a lot of guts, if you ask me. I know many authors whose first book got published, but if I’m not one of those people, I refuse to be embarrassed about it. I’m still on a steep learning curve here, and the days of me believing that writing novels should come naturally to me are long past. Now I just hope I have a sufficient number of good years left to become worthy of publication!
All prayers appreciated, as always. I ain’t gettin’ any younger over here!!
Drop me a comment and let me know what you’re doing! I promise to be a more frequent blogger after the conference…..
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