A wolf in a well
There are two wolves inside you: one that wants to create, and another that wants to consume. Both are hungry. (Please don’t ask me what this means. I wrote this a week ago and don’t remember where I was going with it.)
Hello, and welcome back for another post of The Hell Dispatch with your host, me, Jamison, a very sleepy author. (Calling myself that still feels weird. “Author.” How serious.)
First up, the news: 📰
If the news has managed to elude you thus far, either on Twitter or Instagram, well, I’ll share it again: I signed with a literary agent last week. I have an agent. I have received emails from my agent. I am officially represented by Jennifer March Soloway at Andrea Brown Literary Agency, and now we rejoice, right? The journey is done? I’ll be published?
Well, no. Not exactly.
The road to becoming a traditionally published author is winding and strange, full of redundancies and antiquated rituals under full moons that got lost in translation. Once you have an agent… it’s just that—an agent. The manuscript has to be polished and ready for your agent to put it on “sub” (meaning, submitted to editors at publishing houses) where you wait languidly for someone to love it enough to send to acquisitions, where a room full of stuffy, rich white men decide exactly how much your blood, sweat, tear, and vomit-soaked pages are worth (and they may decide nothing at all). Then, if the planets are aligned, your agent may negotiate a deal on your behalf and you sign, and then you revise again and again while hoping maybe this big, bad, oligopoly of a publisher with billions of dollars in profit will finally issue the meager scraps they promised you a year ago. It’s a circus. I’m not there yet.
Next up for me is bringing I FEED HER TO THE BEAST AND THE BEAST IS ME to a state that is submission-ready, meaning Jennifer will send me an edit letter, demon ballerina Laure will go back into revisions, and hopefully the next version will be closer to ready for an editor’s eyeballs. (Why is this necessary? Because editors aren’t paid well, so they need books to be as close to perfect as possible. It’s a whole thing.) During my last revision, my goal was to tell the best story I could and make it presentable to an agent with the time I had (which, if you recall, wasn’t much time at all). So I knew very well that the story would need further revision. At present, the manuscript is 375 pages with a large cast and a lot of threads that I didn’t have enough time to critically and meaningfully condense. Everyone and everything serves a purpose, great, but it’s dense, it doesn’t need to be, and I made the choice to leave it for now and hope it’d get me agented, where I’d then make it more concise with the care and craft it deserves.
And that’s where I am now.
Here is the character art I commissioned from River (@greydaysghost) of Laure, Andor, the eldritch monster guiding her path, and her best friend and rival, beloved Coralie who was promised the world that Laure snatched away. I hope you love them as much as I do.
The Craft Corner 🎨
This week, at peace before the edit letter arrives, I’ve worked on “refilling my creative well,” which is an important but often subconscious part of the writing process. Creation, as I’ve mentioned, is work that moves in phases and requires a lot of maintenance. Your brain needs rest and exercise and fun, but it also needs to be fed too. Your imagination needs to be refilled with inspiration so that it can run wild. How can you daydream a scene or write words if your head is empty? If you’re straining and running on the fumes of one thing you consumed years ago?
An exaggeration, of course, because sources of inspiration are everywhere, but you get my point. Going on walks and sniffing trees is loading the imagination or idea bank. Reading is loading the bank with words, characters, situations, and moods. Listening to a new album, watching a new TV show, playing a video game, dancing naked around the apartment while you fold laundry, ordering perfume oils are all ways to refill that well. They stimulate your brain in a different way than sitting at your desk with a word processor blown up on screen will.
You may be like, “Well, Jamison, if this is the case, then I refill my well all the time. What’s your point?”
This week, I’ve been intentional about what goes in the well and critically consuming it. When I watched TV, I’ve been studying what I like about it, what makes it compelling to keep watching, why I am inclined to root for one character over another. When I read a book, I study the prose, the way the author has structured the scenes, why the author chose to imbue meaning to this otherwise meaningless action and what that says. Do I value the way she keeps repeating the word “pink” or does it bother me?
In a movie like Jesus Christ Vampire Hunter, what would drive an artistic decision to bring Jesus to modern-day Toronto? Why vampires? Why do they only feed on lesbians? How would the story be different if the creators had decided to make it a drama instead of a horror movie? Or created a new character instead of repurposing Jesus?
And instead of just passively listening to the Broadway recording of Sweeney Todd (with Len Cariou and Angela Lansbury), I read along to the score. I observed how Stephen Sondheim hid cues and emotions in the music itself to influence the listeners’ mood. How did he weaponize silence? And dissonance? A well-placed accidental here to make the skin crawl, a change in tempo there to mimic the change in thought. I read into the origins of the demon barber as a penny dreadful, The String of Pearls, where Sweeney was undoubtedly a villain to be overcome, feeding into fears of crime in newly industrial Victorian London. However Sondheim took inspiration from The Count of Monte Cristo, gifting a backstory of tragedy that turned Sweeney from vile antagonist prone to senseless violence to sympathetic anti-hero in a story of revenge.
Then, I looked at other penny dreadfuls.
Basically, I observe and ask myself a lot of “why”s and “how”s and “what if”s. They make me think about the way stories are structured, choices intentional and not, the many ways to convey information, and the possibilities to expand upon or reinterpret or reconstruct with another lens. I add new weapons to my writing arsenal. I daydream about new scenes or stories or characters or settings born of all the questions and made up answers. I learn to appreciate others’ work more.
This is just as important as words on a page.
And a little Digestif 🧉
I solemnly swear to return to the game of poetry next week, just you watch! In the meantime, have a treat:
LISTENING TO: “Pretty Women” from Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, the original Broadway recording featuring Len Cariou and Edmund Lyndeck — a beautiful duet between two baritones, anti-hero and villain, man harmed and man who harmed, vengeful ghost and his elusive retribution. It is my favorite rendition of the song, and my favorite song in the show.
READING: The Turnout by Megan Abbott
WATCHING: Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (2014 live with the New York Philharmonic starring Bryn Terfel and Emma Thompson)
À la votre! Happy weekend! Hyvää viikkonloppua! ❤️