The great reviews keep rolling in!
Engel navigates issues of class, ethnicity, and identity with finesse in her debut collection, linked stories about Sabina, a child of Colombian immigrants who grows up in New Jersey before heading off to find work and love in Miami. “Diego was this guy that I met on Washington Avenue at three in the morning the summer I quit my job at the art gallery,” the 23-year-old Sabina says in her typically understated voice in “Desaliento,” a story about how dallying with the handsome Argentinean hustler seems glamorous and subversive. In “Lucho,” Sabina, still in high school where her family is considered “spics, in a town of blancos,” a neighbor boy with a rough past is the only one who pays attention to her. In the title story, Sabina, working in Miami, befriends an illegal Colombian immigrant who reveals a tale of being sold to a Miami brothel owner and later being “rescued” by the brothel’s guard, now her boyfriend. Engel’s prose is refreshingly devoid of pomp and puts a hard focus on the stiff compromises Sabina and her family have had to accept; there’s a striking perspective to these stories.
Congratulations, Danielle!!
“Young, intelligent African-Americans become vehicles for their own undoing in this collection of eight stories.
Armed with no easy answers but plenty of bad choices, the talented, too-smart-for-their-own-good protagonists are painfully aware of the consequences of their actions, even when they think they have no better choice. The 15-year-old girl in “Virgins” guiltily opts for the lesser of two evils after leaving her best friend in a precarious situation. A young mixed-race girl exiled to her white grandmother’s Tallahassee home for the summer learns a rough lesson in racial disparity—and the power of a lie. A traumatized Iraq War veteran who becomes a surrogate father to his ex’s little daughter sees his good intentions backfire, big time, over his poor judgment. In “The King of a Vast Empire,” a young man who is talked into a risky road trip with his college-coed sister recalls how shaped they both were by a childhood car accident that destroyed the structure of their family, while leaving it externally intact. After being casually cruel to the fiancé of her former lover, the drifting young woman in “Wherever You Go, There You Are” sees an opportunity for both of them to move on, even if she is not exactly ready. But the moral ambiguity of Evans’s achingly believable world finds its best expression in the devastating final story, “Robert E. Lee is Dead,” in which the brainy black cheerleader, CeeCee, jeopardizes her own high-school graduation with a pointless act of vandalism. Although she is instigated by her closest friend Geena, whose future is less bright, CeeCee’s decision is her own. She shares this characteristic with the other survivors in this arresting book, along with the regret.
A welcome new talent—with a funny and dark take on being black in America.”
It’s been a while since I last posted. This blogging thing is a lot of work! Hats off to all those who manage to post regularly and still lead productive lives. Between going to my oldest son’s college graduation (!) and attending BEA, I felt incapable of thinking coherently, let alone expressing in writing anything worth reading. Anyway, here’s my next piece of advice for aspiring writers, for what it’s worth.
Make sure you have another source of income Even when you do join the ranks of the lucky and receive a contract from a publisher, along with a check, don’t expect to be able to actually live off it. Let’s do the math on the rather substantial advance of $100,000. Six figures, you say! I’m rich! But wait. This advance will be paid out in thirds, or, as is becoming increasingly common, in quarters. The first payment will be paid upon the signing of the contract, which can be six weeks to six months (yes, six months) after the initial verbal agreement. The amount you will receive will be approximately $28,335 (one third of $100,000 minus 15% agent commission), on which you’ll also be required to pay taxes. Depending on your tax bracket, you’ll be left with somewhere around $25,000. This will have to sustain you until the next payment, paid after the publisher has officially accepted the manuscript. This may happen quickly, but it may not. If you have written a very complex manuscript, you and your editor may go through several drafts before it is ready for publication. While this editorial process can be enormously productive, especially for a new writer, it can also be time-consuming. Some of my clients have spent a year or more revising their manuscripts before they were accepted. Once it is, and the manuscript is put into production, it can take from eight months to a year before the book is published, which is when the third payment is due. (As I mentioned above, sometimes, usually when the advance is in the six figures, it is paid out in quarters; the fourth payment is due upon the publication of the paperback, which is usually a year after the hardcover is published.)
Keep in mind that the average advance is substantially below six figures and you can see that it is very important to have another source of income. If you are thinking this sucks, I totally agree with you, since I consider writing a book the hardest thing in the world and it makes me admire all of you who have decided to choose writing as a career all the more.
Yay! Congratulations, Lola! “Gripping…masterful..”
The Secret Lives of Baba Segi’s Wives
Lola Shoneyin, Morrow, $23.99
Blind acceptance splinters a polygamous marriage in Shoneyin’s gripping debut set in modern-day Nigeria. Bolanle Alao, the newest and youngest of Baba Segi’s wives, threatens to upset the balance of power–she is educated and beautiful, though naïve about the relationship dynamics among the other three wives in the house. Raped at 15, Bolanle considers herself disgraced and unwanted until Baba Segi, an overweight, malodorous businessman welcomes her into his family, no questions asked, until it seems she cannot conceive. Like the other wives, she feels she has been saved by Baba Segi, who accepts all of them politely, but beyond brief mentions of his sexual encounters and visits to the toilet, Baba Segi is a peripheral character. When greedy Iya Segi and Iya Femi plot to run young, sweet Bolanle out of the family, the result is disaster. It is Bolanle’s unexpected submissiveness that leads her and her husband to uncover a secret that forces him to assert his control over the family. Shoneyin masterfully disentangles four distinct stories, only to subtly expose what is common among them. (July)
Be prepared: In my experience, the single most common mistake aspiring writers make is to approach agents too early. It is essential, before you start querying a literary agent, that you show you are serious about writing. That means you should have a body of work–articles in newspapers; short stories in magazines; a blog with an active readership. It also means you should take the project you’re currently working on as far as you possibly can before seeking out an agent. I frequently request a manuscript based on an intriguing query letter only to be told that the author is still working on it and will send it in a couple of months. This is fine, except I ask myself why the query went out when the manuscript was still in progress. But what’s not so fine is those cases when I’ll have read part of a submission, only to receive an email asking me to read the new revised version instead. I know that the revision process is endless and I encourage writers to revise obsessively. But once you have sent it out into the world, that, to me, is a signal that it’s polished, ready for a stranger’s (agent’s) eyes. Finally, for fiction writers, as much as I love short stories, unless that is the form you have chosen as a writer, do write a novel. Not only is it easier to sell, but, more importantly, it showcases your writing talents in a way a short story can’t. It demonstrates your ability to develop a character, maintain narrative momentum, juggle multiple plots and subplots and then bring it all to some sort of conclusion.
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