Adios, amigos!

My plane leaves tomorrow morning at 6 for Atlanta and them on to Cancun, Mexico (weather permitting, of course). From there, fourteen of us will pile into two large trucks and/or vans and be driven several miles into the Yucatan to a small village called Leona Vicario.

We'll live there for the next week, in fairly primitive conditions. We travel an additional 100 miles or so inland to a tiny (and I mean tiny) Mayan village deep in the jungle called Tres Reyes (Three Kings in Spanish), where we will work with the Mayans finishing the little Sunday school we started four years ago. My middle son, Zach, went last year. But he's staying home this year because of his job. I know he wanted to go back, even though I suspect it was a hell of lot harder than he had anticipated. :)

The picture is of me (kneeling on the left) in Tres Reyes last year with my friend Jim Witmer and a young Mayan boy we called Pistol Pete (since we couldn't even begin to pronounce his real name). I can't wait to see little Pete this year.

This is my fourth consecutive trip and, as always, I'm both looking forward to it and dreading it.

I look forward to it because it is extremely rewarding work. The Mayans are very poor and live in appalling conditions. Despite a huge guilt complex (because I have it so good here), I fall in love with the villagers every year. Especially the children. They are the sweetest kids in the world.

I dread it because, well, let's face it: It's damned hot and hard work. We work hard in the hot Caribbean sun all day long. After a day or two, I always wonder just why in the hell I am there. Sometimes, we bicker. Sometimes, things get scary because of the drug cartels and the ever-present threat of violence and kidnapping (especially if you are American).

But in the end, I always end up having an awesome time, meet some incredibly special people and learn something about another culture that I didn't know before.

It's also, dare I say it, a very spiritual week. I always feel tired but mentally refreshed when I return, ready to get back to my writing and my exceptionally lucky existence.

I know I have been awful at blogging lately, and for that I apologize. I've been really sick with a nasty case of bronchitis (which is about 80 percent over finally), and I have been working hard on my novel. Now, I'm packing and spending some precious time with my family before I leave the house at 4 a.m. tomorrow for the drive to the airport.

So until me meet again sometime next weekend, please be well and write a lot. I hope you all find agents and multiple book deals when I'm gone. (Ack. I just thought of something. I won't have much Internet access, so I hope if I get any agent news, they don't give up on me. Oh well. I suppose that's a good problem to have, huh?)

Adios my writer friends.

While I wait

Hi there. It's been a while, I know. What have I been doing, you ask?

Well, I've been writing my next novel. I've also been sick, as has most of the family during the past week. I'm also gearing up for my yearly mission trip to the Yucatan. I leave a week from Saturday, and already I'm feeling harried and ill-prepared. In other words, the same old, same old.

But mostly, I've been waiting. You know the feeling, right? At the Writers Digest Conference a few weeks ago, I had four requests by agents to read The Devil You Don't Know -- three partials and a full.

I got a rejection on one of the partials fairly quickly. It was a very helpful one and she said she really liked my writing, so I didn't feel too badly about it. But I've heard nothing yet from the others, nor have I heard anything from the handful of queries I sent out in a rush of anxiety upon returning home.

So, I am writing like a fiend (when I'm not too sick to sit here at my keyboard, that is).

I'm still loving the new book, Empty Spaces. It keeps taking one dark turn after another, sometimes without my permission. I'm mostly a "pantser," meaning I write organically without benefit of a full-blown outline. I do sketch out where I'm going with the book, along with some key scenes and bits of dialogue that come to me.

But mostly, I wait. If nothing else, this whole "trying to get published" scene is teaching me patience, which I sorely lack.

So, how do you guys handle the waiting? Are you able to wade into a new manuscript, or do you agonize and keep hitting refresh on gmail? (Not that I would do that, or course.)

A yowling cat

We have two cats, and they are both pretty old. Annie, the eldest, will be 16 on Valentine's Day, while Martinique (Marty) will be 15 in August. We named Annie Annimaniac after the cartoon and Marty after one of the islands Jennifer and I visited on our Caribbean honeymoon a couple of months after we got her.

A few months ago, Annie starting walking around the house yowling, a sound so piercing and unnerving that it sent chills down my spine. I'd be sitting here at my desk writing and out of the murky darkness just a few feet away would come this ethereal and terrifying sound, as loud as a jumbo jet.

Yowwwwwllllllll. Yowwwwlllllll.

And naturally, I'd freak out and yell at her to knock it off. She would ignore me and go on yowling until I would stomp my feet and then she'd jump and look at me with something like terror in her big green eyes.

I was not sympathetic.

Now don't get me wrong. I love our cats. They are the best house cats in the world. Yes, I mean that. The best. Loving and loyal and all that jazz. Marty, the small, black-and-white jumpy one, took years before she became trusting enough to sit on my lap. She's a bit neurotic, meaning if she were human she'd probably be a writer. For the past six or seven years, I cannot seem to get Marty off of me. She has become my little partner, my little buddy. She lies on my chest while I lay in bed reading or watching television like she's a part of my body. A spare limb or something.

Annie is larger (fat, actually, but don't tell her that) and all black. She's more regal, although as affectionate as Marty in her own way. Annie belongs to Jennifer, while Marty is all mine. It's like we have his and her cats. We like that.

But then Annie starting her incessant yowling and I started having not-so-nice thoughts about her. For instance, I would wonder what would happen if I pegged a book at her. Now I didn't, of course. But I admit I wondered at times, especially after she would yowl loudly at my feet, when I didn't know she was there, and I would jump two feet into the air and clutch my chest. And then it would take me an hour of surfing the Internet before I was ready to write again. Damn cat.

But about six months or so ago, I walked up to Annie while she was curled up on the couch, fast asleep, and reached down to pet her. When I touched her, she shot straight into the air and the fur on her tail puffed up comically like one of those cattails that grow along the river. And that's when I realized something.

Annie had gone deaf.

I started to research deaf cats on the Internet and I realized that it's not an uncommon condition in older cats. And I read something else interesting. It seems that older, deaf cats yowl loudly for two reasons: They fear they've been abandoned because they no longer hear us in the house, and they cannot tell how loudly they are meowing because (duh) they are deaf.

And it broke my heart.

It broke my heart because I realize that I am not unlike Annie. I sit here at my computer and pour my heart out on this book or that book, and I send my queries out to agents and I wait, brokenhearted and fearful, hoping that an agent out there will hear me and respond. I fear that I've been abandoned. And it hurts, doesn't it?

If I could yowl, I would. Seriously.

So now, when Annie yowls and scares the bejesus out of me, I don't yell at her or stomp my feet. I go to her instead and pet her and lean down and nuzzle her and tell her that I'm right here, that she doesn't have to be afraid anymore.

And then I sit down and open my email and wait for someone to do the same for me.

Some perspective

First, thanks to everyone who cheered me on while I was at the Writer's Digest Conference in New York City last weekend. You'll never know how much your support meant to me.

I'm sorry it's taken me so long to post since getting home. I've been crazy busy with both writing stuff and non-writing stuff. It's funny how, once things start to pop, things start popping all over the place.

But in all honesty, there's another, even stranger reason I haven't posted.

I'm superstitious. I don't want to do or say or write anything that might screw things up. For reals.

Anyway, here's my conference story. It's going to be brutally honest and somewhat long, so hang with me if you can.

I had some really bad moments in NYC. Like when I realized my pitch was all wrong and that I was going to bomb horribly and come home embarrassed and unable to face my wife and kids (who had such faith in me).

And, frankly, I was fearing facing all of you here on this blog. Because you have all been so supportive, so confident that I would do well.

So when things went horribly awry, I was terrified. I remember sitting in my hotel room less than two hours before the pitch slam -- with more than 50 literary agents already arriving at the hotel -- and calmly telling my wife on the phone that I was going to skip the pitch and just "soak up all the good writing advice here."

She wasn't buying it, of course. Instead, she offered to help me. So between the two of us (and my 13-year-old), we went back and forth trying to come up with a pitch that would accomplish two things: Do the book justice and not put the agents to sleep.

A word about my wife. She believes in me. No, that's not accurate. She BELIEVES in me. Period. She refuses to accept that I will fail at getting my book published. In fact, I have several friends like that, people who are so absolutely certain that I will succeed wildly at this book-writing thing that to do anything less would be a complete failure on my part. There were people at the conference, important people who I have been lucky enough to become friends with, who believe in me, who spent several minutes talking me down from the ledge when I was ready to jump.

While I love and appreciate their utter support, it has sometimes weighed heavily on my shoulders. Mainly because I know that the vast majority of writers DO NOT GET PUBLISHED. Most DO NOT GET AN AGENT.

I know the odds. You know the odds. And they aren't good.

Now don't get me wrong. I, too, can be very confident of my abilities. And I understand that their support is heartfelt and genuine. And it's appreciated.

But it also, to be brutally honest with you, scares me to death sometimes.

It scares me because sometimes I start to believe it. I start to believe that I am going to succeed. That I am going to snag an agent, snag a big-time book deal and spend the rest of my life doing what I love most. Writing. And making money at it.

I understand that being confident is a good thing. I am confident. But I know from experience that being overconfident is almost always a bad thing. Because it sets us up for major disappointment. And frankly, I've pretty much had my share of those in life.

I've always preferred to remain a realist. A slightly optimistic pessimist.

I didn't realize sitting in that NYC hotel room how important having family and friends who believe in me really is.

Back to the conference: We finally came up with a pitch that worked. Or so we thought. When I sat down across from the first agent, she stopped me seconds into my pitch and said something like, "I don't like that. Why in the world would I root for a protagonist like that?"

I stopped, blinked once, and swallowed hard. Shit. This was not going to go well. We spent all of this money to send my worthless ass to New York, and I AM GOING TO BOMB.

My life flashed before my eyes in the space of about five seconds. And then something happened, something amazing.

I started to talk to the agent. I more or less tossed the prepared pitch away and just told her about my book, about me, why I'm the perfect person to write this book. I even got her to smile and, memorably, to laugh a couple of times. And this is an agent who is not known as a nice person.

My nerves disappeared. I forgot all about the pressure to succeed. Suddenly, connecting with this agent was the most important thing in my life. I made eye contact and kept it. I smiled. I cracked a joke or two. And I pitched that goddamned book live I've never done anything else in my life.

She asked for a partial. And so did the next one.

I connected beautifully with the third agent. By then, I was cooking. She seemed to get my book. Her eyes widened at the exact right moment when I was telling her what it was about and how I had come to write it.

She asked for a full manuscript on the spot.

I walked away to the next agent line with tears in my eyes. I nearly pulled a John Boehner and started bawling on the spot.

Holy crap. I was going to do this! I really was. An hour before, I was ready to quit, and now I had won over a New York agent. It's hard for me to put into words the gratitude I felt at that moment -- gratitude for all of those people who hadn't given up on me even after I had given up on myself. Gratitude that I have the best wife, kids and friends in the world. Gratitude for my friends on this blog, those of you who comment and exhort and just generally care about another writer they don't even know in real life.

Gratitude. It's the only word I can think of to describe what I was feeling.

The final agent I pitched asked for a partial and just like that, the bell rang and the two hours were over.

I could have gone on forever.

But now, after a few days have passed, I look back on it with some perspective. And I can feel the old me coming back. A slightly optimistic pessimist once again.

Because I know the odds. And so do you. They aren't good.

But I'm also convinced that as long as we have each other, and our families, we can do this. One way or another.

We can do this.

Well, the pitch slam is over

And I'm still alive. Sort of.

I had a tough day, culminating in my calling my wife two hours before the agent pitch to tell her that I had decided not to do it. My pitch sucked (it really did; people told me so), and my confidence had swooned.

Naturally, she tried to talk me out of it and -- even though her roller derby team is bouting tonight and she had every reason to think of herself and no one else -- she rolled her sleeves up and wrote me a brand new pitch idea. It was good.

Then I stepped outside the hotel (all right, fine. I had a cigar. Quit looking at me that way) and bumped into the managing editor of Writer's Digest -- the guy who had critiqued my manuscript all those months ago and told me it was good. While we both agreed that being a good pitchman shouldn't be a requirement to get your manuscript in front of a top agent, it remains the reason for the weekend.

So I reluctantly agreed to go ahead with the pitch slam. I rewrote my pitch using my wife's fine idea and took a deep breath and waded into ...

... a freaking zoo! Holy crap. Hundreds of writers lined up 15 deep before each agent, many of whom looked exhausted and a little shocked. Long story short, it's damned hard to pitch a complex novel in 60 seconds to a bored NYC literary agent. It takes every damned ounce of whatever it is that gives us that extra boost when we need it most. For reasons known only to the angels, I had it today.

I only had time to pitch four agents (my top target had to cancel at the last minute due to a family emergency; hope everything is okay there). Four agents who rep my genre. I watched writer after writer leave their tables looking a bit ashen. There were the occasional looks of relief, so some folks were getting bites. But it was nerve-wracking, believe me.

I will spare you the gory details of my pitches (some went well, some didn't), but I will say that when push came to shove, I lost my case of the nerves. I don't know what happened, except I guess I got it all out before the pitch slam. But I was calm and collected and actually enjoyed myself.

And the results? Not bad, actually.

Four agents pitched. Three partial requests. One full request.

Thank you to everyone who supported me on the blog, Twitter and Facebook. But most of all, thanks to my wife, Jennifer.

I could not have done this without you, babe. That's the stone-cold truth.