Sometimes Even Old Ladies Get Published

By Brenda Marie Smith

I was sixty-six years old when my novel, If Darkness Takes Us, was published by an independent press—a day of celebration for sure, but also a day I’d often thought would never come. The book drew on many facets of my actual life, coupled with my deepest fears.

Bea Crenshaw is a grandmother who’s worried about the environment, so she secretly stockpiles food, gear, and seeds to prepare for disaster. She’s keeping four grandkids alone when a solar pulse destroys the U.S. grid, taking cars, phones, and running water along with it. Bea must teach these kids to survive before her heart gives out.

Back in high school in 1971, everyone assumed I would have a long, bright career as a writer. I was runner-up in a national short story contest, I took second place in a statewide poetry contest, I was editor for the school literary magazine and editorial editor for the newspaper. I won a full-ride university scholarship. I was also painfully shy. It was a sin in Oklahoma in those days to show your brains, especially for a girl. I hid my talents, terrified of being taunted for being uppity.

 The Hippie Days

And so, I did what so many young people did back then. I dropped out and took off hitchhiking across the country with the man I would soon marry while I was still only eighteen. We visited all the hippie hot spots—Boulder, the California redwoods, the Oregon coast, Haight-Ashbury. After that, we lived with my husband’s parents in a tiny Louisiana town. I had time to write again, but I couldn’t think of a thing to say.

We moved to the Arkansas Ozark Mountains and lived off the grid, drank from an artesian spring by the back door of our tar-paper shack, and grew a garden. We read spiritual books by lantern light, and my husband burned my poetry in the woodstove, saying I needed to purge my ego. I was stunned, but I was too naive to realize what an absolute bullying act that was.

From there we moved to a hippie vegan community in Tennessee called The Farm. We continued to live off-grid and grow vegetables, and I gave birth to two sons, delivered by midwives. Because we cooked our food from scratch, hauled water, chopped wood for heating and cooking, and lived in households crammed with babies and toddlers, there was no time to think, much less write. I didn’t realize it then, but I was racking up experiences that would later fuel my writing. People often comment on how much research I must have done for my novel, but my life was my research. 

Austin

In 1980 we came to Austin, Texas, and started a tofu salad business. I got involved in the anti-nuclear movement and met cool people who liked the fact that I was smart. I finally realized I was married to the wrong man, but I married a bigger bully soon after. It took me until 1990 to extract myself. I was a single mom to two sons, working a high-stress management job for a student housing co-op, and I did reams of business writing.

At last, I met the right man for me, Doug, the furnace repair guy at the co-ops, and we fled to Las Vegas to get married in 1995 on the lucky day of 7/7. My sons were almost grown by then, and Doug had three tweener sons. I raised teenage boys for seventeen years and somehow survived, though sometimes I wondered if the testosterone levels in our house might kill me.

I quit the high-stress job in 2000 and started doing bookkeeping from home. That’s when, at age 47, I finally got the chance to take fiction courses from UCLA online. I seriously believed I’d be making a living as a novelist in no time. After all, I’d been praised as a business writer for years. How hard could it be to slam out some novels and make piles of money? Ha-ha-ha-ha.

Finally, I Write

Turned out, writing a novel was the hardest endeavor I’d ever undertaken. I pumped out a tome that was 170,000 words long, not realizing that no one but Stephen King and David Foster Wallace got novels published of that length. I submitted that novel to Penguin-Putnam in a contest. They liked the book but said it needed editing—biggest understatement ever. An agent referred me to a teaching editor. He tore that novel up and scrawled across the page, “A plot. A plot. My kingdom for a plot!” Hilarious now, but I cried for a week.

Yet this editor said I had talent, so he took me to school on the craft of writing drama. He was tough on me. I cried every time I talked to him—he even critiqued my emails—but he forced me to learn to accept criticism and lectured me about stakes, stakes, stakes. He charged me a small fortune, money I had to borrow, but I chalked it up to a relatively cheap education, specific for my writing needs.

I rewrote the novel over and over. The story was still too long, and I didn’t know how to write a good query. Then I got an opportunity to make more money than I’d ever made, doing accounting for a two-hundred-million-dollar insurance claim. I shelved the book and worked 60-hour weeks for three years. I was too tired to write at night, so I read hundreds of novels, lots of classics, hoping to absorb good writing by osmosis, even while half-asleep.

I guess it worked, because at the end of it, I knew how to fix my novel. Two old friends were also writing novels so we started a writing group, and that got me inspired again. I tossed out all my rewrites, went back to the original novel, and stripped it down until I got to the actual plot, hidden beneath excess verbiage.

Publishing

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I was scared of hunting for an agent, so I decided to self-publish. I raised the money with crowd-funding, where, like Charles Dickens, I pre-sold books to friends and relatives. And thus, my first novel, Something Radiates, was born, a paranormal thriller based on hippie spiritual lore. It’s still too wordy, but it’s sexy, scary, and unique.

In 2013 I started If Darkness Takes Us during NaNoWriMo. Life kept sidetracking me with money and health issues, but by 2016 I was shopping the book. I entered agent-showcase contests and placed in three of them, but got no bites from agents. Most online contests are focused on YA, and these agents weren’t interested in an apocalypse starring one old woman and written by another. That’s when I realized I was a Southern literary writer, and I‘d been approaching the wrong agents.

I kept rewriting the book. Twice, I scraped up money for development edits, and I queried more than one hundred agents and small publishers. I got mild interest but no success until…

Finding Home

I saw an ad on Twitter for a novel contest from Southern Fried Karma Press, looking for unique Southern voices. I entered the contest and actually won it. I was floored. The prize was a publishing contract. The publisher called to say, “You have found your literary tribe.” And that’s what it felt like—finally a publisher who gets me!

The editing process was hard on a partly-disabled old woman, but I made it through and have a beautiful book as a result. If Darkness Takes Us came out in October 2019. I attended my book launch event in a borrowed wheelchair—I can walk but can’t negotiate the biggest indie book store in Texas on foot. I practiced my reading for weeks. My old-lady voice is scratchy and shaky, and I was so nervous I kept losing my voice. My hubby said, “You talk loud all the time. Just do it.” The book launch was wonderful, family and friends came to town. I cried when I started reading, but I did alright. I never would’ve had a book at all without the endless help of other writers.

In 2018 during NaNoWriMo, I slammed out the first draft of a sequel, writing 120,000 words in 26 days. This book, If the Light Should Come, is told in the voice of Bea’s eighteen-year-old grandson, Keno. It’s a coming-of-age in an apocalypse story. I never knew I had a teenage boy living inside me until he came spewing out. I couldn’t type fast enough to keep up with him. Now I have a contract for the novel to come out in June 2021, from SFK Press’s new imprint, Hearthstone.

My parents, who were always my biggest fans, didn’t live to see me get published, but they saw me start writing again, and they were thrilled. I only wish I’d started sooner. Now I have so many ideas and so little time. But, hey, I got published, which is a dream come true for me. My novel is out in the world with its sequel on the way, I have some fans, a big loving family, and life is good—well, except for pandemics, hurricanes, wildfires, racists, and murder hornets.

Thank you, Mindy, for giving me space to tell my story. I hope it will inspire others to get started on their dreams of writing and to NEVER, EVER give up. 

Debut Novelist Lorelei Savaryn On The Vulnerability of Writing

Today’s guest for the SAT is Lorelei Savaryn whose stories usually focus on the atmospheric and creepy, but always with a pulse of hope. Her debut novel is middle grade contemporary fantasy THE CIRCUS OF STOLEN DREAMS. Twelve-year-old Andrea must rescue her brother from the nightmarish Sandman, who has trapped him in a circus built out of children’s dreams—and nightmares.

Are you a Planner or Pantster?

I am so very much a planner! I work very hard to think through my plot and my theme and character arcs before drafting, although despite my best efforts there are always layers to uncover and many revisions to be done. It helps me, though, to be in a mental space where I at least have the overall scope of where I’m headed sorted out, along with the logic of the world I’m operating inside.

How long does it typically take you to write a novel, start to finish?

If we’re talking first draft to final edits, for my debut, it was about 15 months. For my second book, it will be just under a year. I write middle grade, which means shorter word counts over all, and I usually draft pretty intensely over a month or two and then give it a bit of time to breathe before seeking feedback and working to take the lump of clay I’ve created and carve it into the story I hope to tell.

Do you work on one project at a time, or are you a multi tasker?

I used to be a one project at a time person, but now I’m working to grow more comfortable with working on multiple things at once. Between drafting and revision rounds with my second book, I’ve been working on pitches for future stories, and keeping marketing in mind for my debut. Some days it is a bit overwhelming, but most days I just smile at the fact that I get to do this beautiful work of bringing stories into the world for my job.

Did you have to overcome any fears that first time you sat down to write?

Yes. There was a little voice in my head that wondered if I would keep trying to write books for decades and decades and have nothing to show for it other than piles of trunked, unpublished works. That was probably my worst fear, and I let it slow me down from completing a manuscript for almost 10 years! 

But thankfully, another voice was there, too. That voice that said if I worked hard enough and kept going even when I faced rejection, that eventually I would get something published. And I wanted it enough that I chose to listen to that second voice starting in January 2017.

How many trunked books (if any) did you have before you were agented?

I have one manuscript that I wrote and revised over the course of about a year and a half that I ended up trunking on the day I decided to write what became my debut. That year and a half was time very well spent, as I learned a lot about writing, even though that wasn’t the one for me.

Have you ever quit on an ms, and how did you know it was time?

I shelved my first manuscript when I was much more excited about my new story idea being my debut. I knew it was more marketable, and that I was probably a better fit for middle grade overall (my first ms was YA.) I also have a decent-sized folder on my computer of “Old Story Ideas” that will never see the light of day, from as far back as the early 2000’s. For some of them, I didn’t know what I was doing, or how to really even go about making a novel-shaped thing. For some, the idea just didn’t capture me enough to stick with it for as long as it would take. Others were during the years where I let the fear keep me from finishing or just weren’t that unique or fresh.

Who is your agent and how did you get that "Yes!" out of them? 

My agent is Chloe Seager at Madeleine Milburn Literary Agency in London! I was a Pitch Wars mentee in 2018, but I connected with Chloe via traditional querying after the agent showcase ended. I had two agent offers on the table, and had nudged all agents who still had my manuscript or query. Chloe got back to me quickly after the nudge and we had a lovely phone call. I ended up with five amazing offers by my deadline, which put me in the position of making a very difficult decision. I loved my conversation with Chloe, as well as her editorial and submission style, and I also felt great about the reputation of the agency she worked for. It’s been a beautiful journey ever since!

How long did you query before landing your agent? 

For my debut, I began querying after the agent showcase in February 2019. I had my first agent offer 6 weeks after that. For that manuscript I sent 60-some queries in a very short period of time, partly because I knew that my experience in Pitch Wars had left me with a very polished manuscript that was ready to go.

Any advice to aspiring writers out there on conquering query hell?

I feel like this gets said so often, but it’s really, really true. Having a bad agent is worse than having no agent at all. It’s important to look at agent wish lists, sales records, the agency reputation, how an agent presents themself to the world on various platforms. But, sales aren’t everything either. Choosing to sign with a new agent can be amazing, as Chloe had just moved to MM when I signed with her. But I felt confident in that decision because she was joining an agency that has a stellar reputation and where she would be in an incredibly supportive environment. She was also very eager to make my book her first submission with the agency, and I knew she was going to give it everything she had. It also helped me to have a separate email for queries. That way I could check that email only when I felt ready, and I wasn’t jumping at every notification on my general account. 

How did that feel, the first time you saw your book for sale?

At the time I’m writing these answers, my book isn’t out yet, but I do remember exactly where I was standing when I saw my pre-order links up online! I just stared at it and thought “Oh my gosh that’s my name right there as the author. That’s my book.” But I honestly can’t wait for the day when I can see it on a shelf in person too.

How much input do you have on cover art?

My editor sent over a rough sketch of the cover that had already been through some development within the house. I loved it from the start, and sent over only a very small set of requests that they used to make a few tweaks that really made it just perfect. My team has been wonderful the entire time, and it helped that I trust them to find the best way to catch a reader’s eye.

What's something you learned from the process that surprised you?

I spent a lot of time dreaming about the day I’d be able to say I was a published author, and I am just so excited that it’s actually happening for me. But I was caught off guard at how much vulnerability is mixed in with the excitement! In writing this book, I took a piece of my heart out and wrote it into a story, and it’s time now for me to give that part of my heart away and share it with the world. It’s both exciting and vulnerable, and even though I didn’t expect the vulnerable part, I’m also learning how it is a really beautiful part of the process too.

How much of your own marketing do you? 

We’re still in the process of adjusting PR plans due to the unexpected nature of the events of this year, but I’m focusing on doing what I can marketing-wise, in ways that feel exciting for me. I won’t be able to move the needle of sales the same way my publisher can, but at the same time one of the things I’m most excited about is connecting with readers. I’m going to be running a pre-order giveaway, will be offering author visits, and am working on making my website a fun place to visit and learn!

Website, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram

When do you build your platform? After an agent? Or should you be working before?

I’ve worked on building my platform organically as I went along. I really started connecting with people in the writing community via #PitchWars, and have always wanted to make sure my social media interactions are professional and authentic. I think that’s how I’ll continue forward, even now as I’m going to be focusing more on balancing the relationship and marketing sides of things, too. 

Do you think social media helps build your readership?

That’s a great question! I hope so. I hope that my social media gives a good sense of my personality, and will be a spot where teachers and librarians especially can find ways to connect with me and my book. My goal is to be friendly, approachable, and professional, and to always have in mind ways to help readers connect with my story. If I can use social media for that, then I hope it will help people to find me and my books.