Writing – Emily Timbol

Emily Timbol
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The Monster At The End of The Book

If you asked me my favorite food, movie, or song, or even favorite book, I would hesitate. What would follow is probably a few pained seconds of contemplation, and then a blurted out answer I immediately try to take back. But—if you ask my favorite children’s book? I’ll smile—And tell you all the reasons why I have always loved THE MONSTER AT THE END OF THIS BOOK.

It’s not just because of my affinity for Sesame street, or Muppets (though that helps.) Or even Grover, who is severely underrated, IMHO. THE MONSTER AT THE END OF THIS BOOK didn’t talk down to kids. Sure it’s silly. But the message is all about fear. It’s a little existential too. Mostly though it was hilarious to me as a kid, who on some level could appreciate meta humor before I even fully knew what that meant.

Lately I’ve been thinking about my childhood love for THE MONSTER AT THE END OF THIS BOOK. It’s not that I believe in omens or anything. But facing down the tenth year since I first began trying (on some level or another) to traditionally publish has me fearing flipping yet another page. In 2015 I got so close. Signing with my literary agent in NYC. Then after a year of working on edits with her having my 3rd completed, queried manuscript submitted to publishers at all the major houses….I could almost taste that joy of seeing my words in print, my name on a thick hardcover.

Yet then something that happens to plenty of authors happened to me. The book didn’t sell. Three rounds and no bites from editors. Not an uncommon occurrence. And yet…Then my agent wasn’t interested in the next manuscript I brought to her. That’s just how it goes sometimes. I knew that. Publishing is like that. It’s not personal. But when I tried to peek behind another page of my own monster book in January of this year, I got the email I was so scared was coming. The one I had been blockading my self against. Stacking the mental and emotional walls higher and higher to protect myself from. But like Grover, it was foolish. I didn’t have an agent anymore. The Monster at the end of the book was me.

In the children’s book Grover tries to convince the readers that he was in on the joke all along. That you, the reader were the real scared one. His embarrassment is clear though, and you laugh at him, even as you feel bad for him. Silly Grover. Who would ever be afraid of themselves? Couldn’t you see this coming?

Welp. I’m at the end of my pages. It’s just me and the shiny aluminum foil glued to the paper distorting back my reflection. Maybe I don’t want to be a monster. What happens if when you get to the end of the book you realize you want to be something else entirely? Like the person you thought you were going to be at the beginning?

These are questions with answers I know I’m not going to find in the pages of children’s literature. No matter how much I love it. I’m planning on going over them with someone qualified to help me tackle them. Because now that I’m an adult, I can see that living with fear of the unknown isn’t fun. Although living with a self-referential Muppet definitely would be.

I have more words in me. And I’m not giving up. There’s always another page to turn.

Publishing, Writing 0 Comment

Home is Food

Mar

I wrote and submitted (a modified version of) this essay for an Asian American Writers Workshop workshop anthology, about the concept of “home.” The essay ultimately wasn’t chosen for the anthology, but after spending a weekend with my sister and talking a lot about our childhood, I wanted to put it out into the world anyway. Enjoy.

My childhood is most easily defined by food. Not just because I was a round, soft adolescent, more likely to be found inside reading a book with my hand inside a bag of chips instead of outside getting dirty. Food wasn’t just something I enjoyed, that gave me pleasure. It was the bridge between my two very different, yet normal to me, familial worlds. Food was home.

It is not hard to think of the single food that best defines my racial make-up. We had a name for it, growing up. A name I only realized as a teen was made up by my grandfather, Lope Timbol. It was what he called “Filipino Spaghetti” (which I now know is just Pancit) and it was served weekly alongside heaping dishes of Baked Ziti and steaming piles of handmade Lumpia.

My grandfather and grandmother met soon after WWII ended. When I was a child, he would regale me with his tales of life in the Philippines, which I always pictured as a lush, frightening jungle. He told me about his brother the Guerilla fighter, who tried to sneak food to the American men being marched to their death by Japanese soldiers. If Filipinos were caught trying to aid the Americans they were shot on site. He told me how he lied about his age and joined the American Navy, crying and begging for his mother once his home island faded into the distance, and he understood what he’d done. As I got older he told me how he was separated, segregated, I realized later, with the other “colored” naval men who all served as cooks or in lower ranking service positions.

There’s a lot of family myth in how my Italian grandmother and Filipino grandfather got together. Some of it salacious, some too far-fetched to ring true. But what I do know is they wed, had children, and when my father was ten years old moved from Naples, Italy to the States.

When you’re a child, you don’t always question the world as it’s presented to you. I never questioned why there were three languages spoken at family dinners and get togethers. Italian, Tagalog, and English, all sometimes spoken in the same sentence, was normal. As was the fact my Nona and Zia’s had all married Filipino men, resulting in a large family that could be easily visually divided.

It didn’t seem odd to me at all, until the rare occasions I’d bring a friend over.

My excitable Nona would hand them a slice of toast with Nutella on it and they’d stare at it, whispering to me, “what did she say?” Or they’d look with furrowed brows at my grandfather, then back at me, confused.

I look white. To most people. And since most of my friends in northern Florida were white, black, or non-Asian, I just kind of grew up thinking I was white, with a mixed race family. It was confusing, when I’d try out saying I was Asian, and my white family members would make sure to remind me that I was “mostly” German. Plus my sister, who more resembled our father, was the only one people said had “exotic” features (something I later found out wasn’t really a compliment.) I was just Emily. A white girl who tanned really easily.

My racial identity had always been complicated. But it wasn’t until I began supporting the Black Lives Matter movement that I started to question my honesty when identifying myself. For a year or two I self-identified as a “white ally.” Once joking in a rough draft of an essay that I was white (mostly), until my Latinx friend reading over it stopped me. He said that this might confuse people. It wasn’t until he said this that I realized I too, was confused.

Quite honestly, I didn’t know what I should consider myself.

It seems way too easy to claim an identity that doesn’t seem mine; mixed race. My nephews are mixed race, half black and half white, and they face prejudices I never have. They’re teased by black peers for their light skin, and looked at with suspicion by white people who are wary of tall teens with textured hair wearing hoodies and basketball shoes. But no one ever commented negatively on my skin tone. I’ve never questioned if I was denied a job, date, or apartment because of my race.

While writing a novel that dealt heavily with racial prejudice, I started to think about the deeper things that separate white people from people of color. The psychological burden that comes with knowing your ancestors, maybe only a couple generations removed, were subjugated and discriminated against because of the color of their skin. Racism and discrimination don’t just breed injustice and anger, but shame too. White children have to learn about racism. It’s a subject taught at home or in school, something they have to work to conceptualize. But children of color know it more deeply. It’s in the way their grandparents avoid certain parts of town, the way their parents teach them to deal with police before they ever sit behind a steering wheel.

When my grandfather left the Navy, he worked as a janitor for the local newspaper. For over twenty years he cleaned up after people who mostly ignored him. Reporters, photographers, writers. He picked up their trash.

My father graduated from FIT, marrying my mother, who tells me stories of how people looked at them strangely when they moved to the south. He got the education my grandfather never could, and worked in technical fields, even for a time for NASA. Growing up he liked to joke that he could handle anything hard, because he was indeed a rocket scientist.

I honestly don’t think my parents wondered how race would affect their eldest daughter. I was just Emily. Their well behaved baby who turned into a defiant, loud child and adult. It wasn’t until my sister came along six years after I was born that women would stop my mother on the street, asking in hushed voices if she was adopted. With jet black hair, dark skin, and a fondness for running around in a diaper, my sister’s childhood nickname was “Mowgli.” Every year on Halloween her friends would convince her to dress up as Jasmine or Pocahontas. Me all the while fondly remembering dressing up as Belle. It didn’t help that my sister’s best friend growing up was Chinese-American, and people would often comment that they looked just like sisters. This hurt me, every time. Because I always heard the unsaid in that comment. Her and I looked nothing alike.

It was writing that made me finally confront the issue of my racial identity head-on. There’s a movement among the literary community to lift up writers of color. The whitewashing in publishing is being exposed, talked about, and critiqued by people both inside and outside the industry. Discussions revolving the issues of appropriation vs. appreciation, the importance of own voices telling stories, and fighting the idea of diversity as a trend have dominated literary Twitter. And while I enthusiastically share the links and nod my head, I feel even more unsure of what to say.

If the man who raised the man who raised me was segregated, then it stands to reason that the poison of racism is at least sprinkled throughout my blood. Yet claiming this marginalization feels wrong, especially in light of the white blood mingling with my grandfather’s—blood that has faced no such struggle. So each time a contest or blog post or thread pops up that creates a line between marginalized and non-marginalized writers, I dutifully place myself on the side opposite the oppressed, but with maybe a toe, a foot, or a hand reaching across the line. “I kind of get it”, I want to say. “I’m here for you, but also maybe sort of like you?”

During the most unsettling of these moments, I find myself returning to an old comfort. There’s nothing like biting into a warm, golden fried “Filipino egg roll,” as my grandfather called them, to make me feel at home. Food is one part of my identity I never question. Because it’s impossible for me to eat Lumpia without picturing all the birthday parties and holidays when I was too young to worry about what I was, really. So is walking into my parent’s house after my father has spent all day cooking chicken cacciatore, the scent of garlic and marina bringing back memories of long weekends visiting home during college. Remembering feeling that first stretch of independence. How it ached, yet I still leaned into it. Food is a huge part of who I am. Who I’ll always be. My mother taught me to love my faith, but my father and his family taught me to love food. And now, when I can’t decide where on the spectrum I fall, it’s food I use to orient myself (no pun intended.)

Fusion. If I had to pick a way to describe my racial identity to a stranger, I’d use this term. A working of two or more flavors that are different, yet complementary, that creates something unique. I’m like that restaurant on the corner of the neighborhood that you peer into, face cupped in your hands. Something you might not have encountered before, but exists nonetheless. Most people probably have no idea what it is. They might not like it. Fusion isn’t for everyone. But I’m here, and I have a voice, and I hope to use it to say that there are lots of other people like me out there. And we’re not going anywhere.

Blog, Writing 0 Comment

Working Towards 10,000 Hours

Jun

When I first heard of the (wildly debated) theory of the “10,000 Hours rule” I was immediately intrigued. Roughly summarized, it’s the belief that to master anything—piano, sailing, rock climbing, or say, writing—you have to spend at least 10,000 hours practicing it the “correct way.”

Lots and lots of people think this theory is crap, but setting aside it’s practical purposes, it offered me a bit of relief as an up-and-coming writer. I’m no newbie, but I’m also not a publishing veteran. When I queried my first manuscript, I would have self-identified as an intermediate writer. Definitely not a beginner or novice, since I had written a screenplay in college, completed an undergraduate creative writing class, attended multiple writers workshops, and published dozens of essays and articles online. But maybe not yet an expert, since the manuscript I was querying was my first complete one, my lone other novella abandoned when I needed to go back to 6th grade.

As an exercise, after learning about the rule, I sat down and calculated a rough estimate of the hours I’d spent, so far in my life, writing. After I totaled it all up I was flabbergasted, and redid the math three or four times, convinced I must have made a mistake. Because at the time I first counted, I had completed less than 1,000 hours of writing. And a good chunk of that probably could be disqualified for not being “correct.” (Side note: I’m not sure the correct clause really applies to mastering writing, since the only way to become a good writer is to first write a hell of a lot of crap.)

I remember furiously googling and finding comfort in all the articles claiming that the 10,000 Hours rule had no merit. Even though most of the people de-bunking the theory didn’t say that all that practice or time spent investing in your craft was unnecessary, but rather there was no guarantee that after 10,000 hours, you’d be the next Joan Didion.

I mostly forgot about the theory as the years went by, since I was so busy working on my next two manuscripts, that first one I queried having failed to land me an agent. I only was reminded of it recently because of some conversations I’ve had with aspiring writers, devastated at the idea that their first novel, which they spent so much time on, might not get representation. A lot of these writers felt like any completed novel that doesn’t get published is a failure. That’s what I thought too, before, so I completely understand why so many writers feel that now.

That’s not something I agree with anymore, having finally signed with a literary agent. I no longer view any of the time I spent writing or editing my previous (unpublished) manuscripts as a waste, because if it hadn’t been for that time, I wouldn’t have finished a manuscript that was publishable (fingers crossed.)

Princess Bubblegum

What the 10,000 hours theory can help writers be reminded of, is how long of a process it can be, if you want to be successful in the publishing industry. I have almost certainly spent at least 10,000 hours dreaming of being published (say, 4 hours a day over the seven years I spent working towards getting an agent) even if I, at my most recent calculations, have spent only a tenth of that time actually working towards my goal. It’s not fast. It’s tedious. Succeeding on the traditional publishing path is the kind of journey that while you’re on, you have to be willing to see a number like 10,000 hours and go, “psssh, more like 15,000.” 10,000 hours might be only the beginning for some writers.

But the good news (there is good news, I swear) is that writing is one of those things that, if you truly work harder at, you almost can’t fail at improving. There’s certainly some writers who will, for whatever reason, never quite capture the spark needed to inflame a readers attention, but for the vast majority of writers, that spark is still obtainable, if it can be whittled out of the mud. And I say that as someone who still has many, many hours ahead of me, and lots of mud to crawl through.

All that to say, don’t give up. I’m still slogging on, racking up hours of experience, and I hope to meet lots of other writers doing the same.

A 10,000 Hours Breakdown for me –

200+ published and drafted blog posts – average of 1.5 hours spent on each = 300 hours

50+ published essays and articles for various online and print publications – average of 2.5 hours spent on each = 125 hours

62,000 word completed manuscript – 3 hours writing and 2 hours editing per 1,000 words = 310 hours

63,000 word completed manuscript– 3 hours writing and 2 hours editing per 1,000 words = 315 hours

74,000 word completed manuscript – 2 hours writing and 2 hours editing per 1,000 words (I got a little faster) = 296 hours

50,000 +/- total words for unfinished or abandonded manuscripts – 2 hours writing per 1,000 words = 100 hours

Three 6-week Shanty Boat Writers Workshops, at 3 hours per night, each = 54 hours

Creative Writing course in college –
2 hours per week X 30 weeks = 60 hours

Adolescent/non-serious writing when I was a kid/teenager – one novella at 15 hours, one screenplay at 21 hours, misc short stories = 50 hours

Total: 1,610 hours

Writing 5 Comments

How I Got My Agent (IT’S REALLY HAPPENING!)

May

Forewarning, this will be long and filled with gifs. The stats are at the bottom, feel free to skim!

Tom_Benedict

I still cannot believe I am writing this post. Not in a cute, faux-humility way, like when supermodels say they can’t believe people actually think they’re pretty (just shut up Gisele.) But in a “I’ve been dreaming about this for so many years while racking up SO MANY REJECTIONS that now that it’s actually happening it doesn’t feel real” kind of way. Someone slap me.

April Slapping Ben

While I’ve been writing my whole life, leaving a whole wake of started and stopped novels, novellas, short stories, and even an embarrassingly horrible screenplay, I never considered myself a “writer.” I knew that I wanted to make a difference in the world, and for a long time I thought I had to do this through other means, because I was too scared to give myself that title I didn’t feel worthy of claiming. “Writer.” It wasn’t until 2009, when the author of a book I loved replied to an email I sent her with, “why aren’t you writing?” that I allowed myself to dream. It’s sad, but I needed someone else to confirm the longing I’d always had. I was a writer. I needed to write.

So I did. It was like the first twenty-four years of my life were the warm-ups and now I WAS OFF.

Tina running

The author of the book, Susan Isaacs, became my mentor, and helped introduce me to a writing community I owe a huge debt of gratitude to, The Burnside Writers Collective. Within a year, I had a handful of articles and essays published online, a blog, and the thing I most wanted, an idea for a book.

Because everything happened so fast and so (relatively easy) I had a false sense of confidence. I’d been writing my whole life, everyone said how talented I was, surely I didn’t need to do a ton of research or prepare myself for rejection! I was unique! It would be different for me!

SImpsons crowd laughing

What followed was one of the hardest years of my life. While building an online platform and dealing with a crisis of faith and identity, I received over 100 rejections from agents and indie publishers. That first manuscript might have been written well (said the lone agent who read some of it) but it was not sell-able in a market already saturated with books like mine. If I had done any research, I would have known that. After querying it unsuccessfully for a year it became a niche book for my friends and the small community of writers and progressive Christian activists who supported me. My dream of being published traditionally still seemed far out of reach.

I took a year off to sulk and question what I wanted in life.

Lydia Deetz

Then, in late 2014 I realized a couple big things. 1) I couldn’t not write. It was killing me not creating, and 2) I didn’t want to write non-fiction, or memoir. Novels were what I loved to read, where I became most enamored. Fiction gave me life. While I enjoyed writing essays and non-fiction pieces, I cared much more about telling engaging stories with imagined characters. So I got to work on my first novel, WHERE HE SENT US. It was a YA contemporary about a teenage girl harboring a huge secret, taken captive by her strict religious family, who set sail across the ocean for a fundamentalist encampment.

I started it during NaNoWriMo 2013, and it took me about a year to finish, edit, and receive beta reader feedback on. Reader, I loved this novel. I still do, although I can now see that, despite the positive feedback I got, it was very much a “first” novel. Almost there, but not quite ready.

In 2015, while I was querying and getting (encouraging!) rejections for WHERE HE SENT US, I began to do something I should have been doing all along. I read as much as I could about querying, agents, and the publishing industry. Prior to my first book I’d only focused on building my craft (taking writers workshops, joining critique groups, reading writing books) but after that experience I realized I needed to learn the business side as well. Something unexpected happened then. I started to gain perspective. It became apparent to me that the biggest secret I needed to succeed wasn’t a secret at all. It was just persistence. Research taught me that it was totally normal to not get agented until my third, fourth, maybe even fifth or more manuscript. Success takes time! I needed to be in it for the long-haul.

Ally Sheedy bored

So, undeterred by my growing stack of rejections, in the middle of querying WHERE HE SENT US I began writing my 2nd YA novel, JUSTIFIABLE, about two 17-year-old girls whose worlds collide when their fathers are on opposite ends of a racially charged fatal police shooting. Since I wanted to see if I could “win” NaNoWriMo (I’d only made it 1/2 way in 2013), I entered in November 2015 with JUSTIFIABLE, completing my first draft of the novel and “winning” the event. I loved JUSTIFIABLE even more than WHERE HE SENT US, and the main characters, Bree and Madison, seemed more real to me than any I’d written before. By this time, I only had one full still out with an agent for WHERE HE SENT US, and I stopped querying. After a month of edits, including some wonderful beta and sensitivity reader feedback from L.D., a new critique partner I’d met through NaNoWriMo, I began querying JUSTIFIABLE, in January 2016.

I tried so hard to be objective, and level-headed, but when the requests came pouring in, I gave into hope.

Theyre looking for hope

A handful of agents had requested WHERE HE SENT US and passed, but enthusiastically asked for my next project, so I first just sent queries for JUSTIFIABLE to them. Almost all of these agents requested the full manuscript. I was ecstatic. This was going to be it! I’d be able to report my stats and be one of those obnoxious writers who sent like, six queries and gotten three requests, and as many offers! Remember that objectivity I said I had? Yeah, neither did I.

Sorry people are so jealous of me

Slowly, rejections to my requests trickled in.

Gillian Anderson FacePalm

These rejections were even more encouraging than the ones for WHERE HE SENT US. I got very used to seeing the words, “I think you’re an excellent/very good/fantastic/etc writer, and I love this concept but…..” Many, many nights were spent lamenting to my husband and family and writing friends. I began to wonder if there was something fundamentally wrong with my style, that made it impossible for agents to connect with my writing. Even though plenty of people told me I just needed to get my work in front of the right person, I struggled to believe them.

george michael bluthe

When I’d sent around 50 queries and gotten close to a dozen rejections on my requested fulls/partials, I decided to move my focus to the next book. I started on my 3rd novel, a YA thriller about a girl who begins a dangerous obsession with finding the man who kidnapped her younger sister. The advice everyone gives to start something new while you’re querying is absolutely true. Getting excited about this new manuscript took a lot of the anxiety out of, what I was convinced, would be the eventual rejection of JUSTIFIABLE.

After I’d sent around 75 queries, I told my husband I was going to shelf the rest of the ones I’d planned to send. I only had about ten left, and I didn’t think it was worth it. But he (and my father) convinced me I had nothing to lose, so, begrudgingly, I sent another batch of five.

Louis Guzman gif

One of these queries was to an associate agent at an agency I’d gotten rejections from twice in the past. I had planned to query the same agent who rejected me before, until I saw the profile for this new agent, Ashley Collom. Her interests seemed to line up perfectly with mine, and the manuscript, so I crossed out the name of the agent I’d planned to query, and sent her an email instead. This was on May 8th, 2016, almost four months after I began querying JUSTIFIABLE.

A day later she requested the full. At this point, full requests barely elicited any excitement from me, since I’d gotten so many rejections on them. I sent it to her. A day later, on May 10th, I got this email from Ashley:

Hi Emily,

Just wanted to let you know I’m only a bit into your manuscript, but you already had me crying on the train. Bravo! 😉

I started to feel that little tingle of something I’d almost forgotten how to feel. Hope. I’d never gotten an email like that from an agent before. I told my family and my husband and they all got incredibly excited, even when I tried to convince them this didn’t mean anything.

Then, a day after the above email, I got another one from Ashley that said, “Offer of Representation” in the subject line.

I have gmail notifications set up at work, so I saw a little preview pop-up in the lower corner of my monitor, before I even opened my inbox. I’m pretty sure all of my co-workers heard me gasp. I was shaking while I read her email, which was unbelievably enthusiastic. She loved JUSTIFIABLE. Better still, she got it. Even the subtle things I’d been trying to get across, she loved them all. It needed some work of course, and she wanted to talk to me about it, but she was passionate about making it shine.

Once my hands stopped shaking I called my husband and parents, and commenced the freaking out. Then I emailed back Ashley, and let her know I would need at least a week to decide, since I had fulls and queries still out with several agents. I wanted to be professional, and all the advice I had read said not to accept the first offer, since you needed to give the other agents still reading a chance to respond.

That’s when things got real. When I queried Ashley, I had eight fulls out, and around a dozen pending queries. Now, if that sounds like a lot, remember I already had eleven full/partial rejections, so in my mind, those eight fulls were just rejections-in-waiting. But within minutes/hours of sending my “Offer of Rep” email, I had four more requests for fulls, from agents who only had my query. So all of a sudden I had an offer, and twelve other agents reading my full, at least half of them with the direct purpose of seeing if they wanted to make a counter offer within the week.

This was SO surreal. For seven years, I’d been dreaming, hoping, fantasizing, crying, lamenting, and thinking of little else than getting an agent. For four years, I racked up nothing but rejections. So much of the past four years was sitting in silence, days and weeks going by with no responses. And then in what seemed like a blink of an eye, my inbox was FLOODED with responses from agents. Very interested agents! Complimentary, friendly, really impressive agents.

At the end of the week, I had five offers of representation. Five(!!) No one expected this less than me. It’s not that I didn’t believe in JUSTIFIABLE, it was just that everything happened so fast. It felt like I had the literary makeover equivalent of having my glasses and ponytail removed, and now I was the most popular girl in school. I’m not used to being popular. It was incredibly stressful.

The worst part was, because I’d done so much research before querying, all of the agents who offered I would have loved to sign with. I was mad that they were all so nice, and professional, and friendly, and that I felt like I “clicked” with all of them. The idea of disappointing any of them caused me so much anxiety and stress that I woke up one night literally choking on stomach acid. Which was a first.

But in the end, I went with my gut. After a lot of thought and consideration, I accepted the first offer I received, from Ashley Collom at DeFiore and Company. Even though I’d have been incredibly lucky to sign with any of the agents who offered, Ashley was the most passionate, and the one who had the clearest vision for my manuscript, that best aligned with my own. I could not be more excited to work with her on getting JUSTIFIABLE ready for submission.

From querying my first book, to accepting the offer from Ashley, it took me almost four years, exactly, to land an agent. But it feels like it took a lifetime. And I can’t wait to see what happens next.

Now, to what everyone really cares about. The stats! (I’m just including the novels):

Book 1 (WHERE HE SENT US):

80 queries.

4 full requests.

2 partials (one upgraded to full)

Time queried until put in drawer – 7 months

Book 2: (JUSTIFIABLE):

78 queries.

19 full requests.

7 partials.

5 offers of rep

Time from first query to offer – 4 months

Time from full request to offer – 3 days*

*The quick turnaround How I Got My Agent stories always killed me, because whenever I got a full request, I never heard back until at least two months went by. But there ARE success stories that took a few months from request to offer, I promise! I’ve read them! Don’t give up hope!

hold on gif

Note: since the initial publishing of this post, Ashley and I have decided to part ways.

Writing 6 Comments