Ann Aguirre

“I like your dark, FIREFLY kind of world.”

This comment about Grimspace came from an agent I didn’t sign with, and it got me thinking about how I wound up with the “world” I invented.

Then a reader emailed me, asking for more details about the book. She’s a fan of girlie sci-fi that features fast-paced, edge-of-your seat action spiced with longing and angst. Well, good news for her, that’s exactly what I’ve written.

So here’s the thing. I didn’t do what most writers do in terms of world-building. I didn’t sketch out the galaxy and name the planets and decide what technology was available. Set up a story board and do reams of pre-work.

I sat down with a blank mind, and I wrote. I did everything wrong too, according to the textbooks. Just for starters, I wrote in present tense and in first person. Jax isn’t a kinder, gentler heroine either; at the beginning, she’s a chilly, self-involved bitch who cares for nothing as much as saving her own ass. (Don’t worry, she grows throughout the book.) But if everyone else is following the rules and you break them in the right way, does that make your book fresh?

Hell if I know.

Anyway, I revealed information about the world as I went along, but of course, I was limited to what Jax would know. And if she didn’t know, I didn’t. It was just that simple.

The end result is a world that combines the feel of Joss Whedon’s FIREFLY with the world set forth in PITCH BLACK. I didn’t set out writing with those in mind, but when someone else spotted the influence, I couldn’t dispute it. My universe is stark and currently in turmoil, populated by humans and aliens, striving to coexist.

I also spun the idea of the Corporate environment growing to an insane scale. Imagine a company so big, so many branches, so many employees, so much money and power, that over time, it replaced the government. Sound crazy? Give Microsoft a few hundred years. :)

Another wrinkle I put into things is communication. Since I eschewed faster than light travel in lieu of grimspace, this creates a question of “how do they communicate over long distances?” Well, they utilize bounce-relay satellites, and it’s not instantaneous. It’s like interplanetary email and it takes time. Unless you’re within a certain range, there’s no instant communication in my world. This creates unbelievable difficulties if you’re waiting for word before making a decision. I also take current emerging technologies into consideration when defining what science looks likes. There are no warp drives or teleporters to be found, but you can certainly replace damaged body parts via hospital organ banks.

I could go on, but it’s probably best to let you discover the rest yourself. Though you may see glimmers of FIREFLY and PITCH BLACK in this book, I’ve created something uniquely my own, and I hope you enjoy getting lost in the world Jax lives in next March.

Warning–this post will be long, rambling and contains anecdotes that cannot be verified. However, if you persevere, you may learn something. Then again, you might just be bored stupid. Read on at your own risk.

I suspect a few people out there, hearing about my sale to Ace, are probably like, damn, I’ve been trying so long, and shit just happened so fast for her. Whore.

What ya’ll don’t realize is how long I’ve been doing this. So to put it all in perspective I’m going to tell you my (writing) life story. When I was in first grade, we had something called Career Day at school. We got to pick out what we wanted to do; they had cards with job descriptions on them. I picked out “freelance writer” because it was the only thing to do with stories. My teacher said, rather condescendingly, “That’s not a real job, honey. Why don’t you pick something else?” That should have prepared me for the row I had to hoe over the years. What can I say, I’m a slow learner.

Well, I never did pick anything else. When I was nine, I wrote my first “book.” It was a Scooby Doo style story called “The Mystery of the Golden Doubloon.” I won a contest at my school and went to a state-wide competition called The Young Authors Conference, where I met Shel Silverstein. He read to us from Where the Sidewalk Ends. That was the thrill of my young life.

Around junior high, I wrote a seventy-page novella in my Garfield notebook. It was a fantasy thing about a young man on a quest, accompanied by an elf, a dwarf, and he meets a beautiful maiden who can turn into mist when it rains. I forget what else happened, and my mother made me throw it away because the dwarf swore too much. Curse you, parental censorship!

I continued writing scraps of this and that as I went on through school. In tenth grade, I wrote my first novel, yes, an actual novel. It was 150 pages, typed on an old typewriter. I wrote it for one of those Sweet Valley High type lines. I forget which one. It was awful: a small-town girl meets a mysterious boy who works as the Winnie the Pooh mascot at Sears. Turns out he’s on the lam because he ran afoul of the mob, and despite having led a boring life, our heroine turns intrepid adventuress, saving the boy numerous times. I wrote a wonderful letter to the editor along the lines of “I love your books! I’m a teenage girl, so I am sure teenage girls will love my book too!!” I was heartbroken when they sent me a form letter, and I felt betrayed when I discovered teen books were written by OLD WOMEN. The horror! I stopped reading them in protest, but nobody ever asked me why. Huh.

My next attempt came when I was 19 and in college. I was studying English Lit, which mostly bored the crap out of me, but I thought it would teach me more about writing. I discovered romance novels about this time, Kay Hooper, Iris Johansen, and I ate them like Cracker Jacks. I thought, I can do this! How hard can it be?

Thus was born my deliciously bad Loveswept targeted romance novel. Our heroine, Skye, is a stripper / heiress. You see, she ran away from her father’s oppressive tyrannical control to dance topless and make her own way in the world. Her father, being a Big Meanie, cannot allow her live her own life, so he hires former Black Ops Military man, Stone, to retrieve Skye. Skye and Stone, isn’t it just too precious? Sparks fly immediately between these two. He is struck immediately by the need to possess her carnal innocence. Lots of melodrama ensues, and he eventually drags her back to her father’s estate. More shenanigans, and then it’s revealed that her father is a CRIMINAL. Long story short, Evildaddy goes to jail, Skye inherits what’s left of his fortune, and Stone helps her set up a fund to save endangered wombats or some such thing. Isn’t love grand? I called it Heaven and Earth. Because of their names. Get it?? Symbolism! Who says I’m not using my Lit degree. To my astonishment, Loveswept didn’t buy it!!! I know, right?

Reeling from that rejection, I decided I wasn’t meant to write contemps. By then, I had discovered historicals: Laura Kinsale, Kristin Hannah, Patricia Gaffney, Anita Mills…oh, swoon. Hey, this doesn’t look so hard. I bet I could write one! Seeing a pattern yet?

So I wrote a dark, gritty historical romance I called Light a Candle. The hero was a tortured bastard son who inherited a title, when all he wanted was to be farmer and a poet. The heroine was a fabulously wealthy merchant’s grand-daughter. Her father was a famous explorer, and they first meet when she’s a girl, because the hero, Adam, comes to their townhouse to ask to examine some things in her father’s collection. Her mother is mad and reclusive, so the hero feels sorry for the girl. They strike up an unlikely friendship that ends up ruining her reputation. I broke every rule with this book. I patterned it after Anita Mills’s Autumn Rain but I didn’t have the skill to pull it off entirely. I had the hero and heroine married to other people for a while but in love with each other. It was lovely in some ways, but horribly flawed. This book was the first “not bad” thing I wrote.

I was all of 21 years old. I bought a book with a listing of agents in it and started sending queries. Imagine my shock when I interested people at Jane Rotrosen Agency. They shopped it for me in NY. Yes, I was 21!! I received many compliments on my writing, but everyone felt the book was flawed. They asked me to send my second novel, so I wrote another one. This one had a heroine named Grania and a hero named Ravyn (yes, I was at the stage in my career where I thought it was Ultimate kewl to substitute a Y for other vowels at random. I’m just thankful I didn’t catch Glottal Stop Fever along the way.)

Anyway, the hero came from a cursed bloodline, where he’s doomed to marry a woman he hates, who will die in childbirth. He hires the heroine to catalogue his library. It was very prettily written, but the fine ladies at Jane Rotrosen told me it had two problems (a) it wasn’t a romance because the heroine and hero don’t spend enough time together and (b) it had no conflict. (They were right!) Being an inexperienced knobhead, I concluded the people at Jane Rotrosen didn’t know what they were doing (because my book was GOOD, wasn’t it?) I severed that relationship and sulked for a while.

After that, I had some babies and continued to write but I was afraid to show anyone anything. People were mean! And cranky. And terribly unfair. Thankfully, I got over this hypersensitive assclownishness.

My children were toddling when I finally sold my first book. It was “lit-ruh-chure.” Boring, depressing, poetic, and it has a dreadfully sad ending. It sold like twenty copies, including people I know. I finally got my nerve back, though. And I had learned something: just don’t give up, no matter what.

I sold two historical romances (though not that first flawed one). They received excellent reviews. Then the small publisher I wrote for went belly up and I never got paid. I felt like I’d been wasting my time.

Around then, I said “bollocks to romance, I’ll write fantasy!” and I enrolled in the Online SFF Writing Workshop. So happened, Del Rey partnered with them that year. I won the Editor’s Choice contest and wound up with a publishing contract with Del Rey Digital. That was my first experience writing on a deadline, and I am hella proud of Stone Maiden. I thought I had it made then. My editor loved me, and I expected a long and fruitful relationship. Then they let her go. My new editor barely knew my name, and thus my career ended before it began.

But I didn’t give up. I decided to give contemporaries a try since the historical market seemed to have dried up, and I was mad about the whole fantasy thing. I finished Guide in September of 2005. I once again began to query this time, but I was determined to find an agent. No more peddling my own stuff.

The search went slowly, and it nearly drove me mad, but in May, I signed with an agent. It took her four months, but she eventually pitched Guide to nine major publishers for me. I received some lovely rejections, including “send me your next book!” but they were rejections just the same. This wasn’t the one for NY.

I was way frustruated by this point. I can write, can’t I? I’m getting better every time. Why aren’t I selling?

Some of the joy went out of writing too. I started to feel like, “What’s the point? Nobody but me will ever read this.”

To counteract that feeling of futility, I went with it. I said to myself, “Okay, if nobody but me will ever read it, then I’ll write for ME.” I sat down at the keyboard with an utterly blank mind, no plot, no idea, no characters, and just began to WRITE. It was…magical. I wrote and wrote and wrote.

The end result was Grimspace, the book Ace bought.

I had to switch agents to make that happen, and I’m glad I did. See, when I finished Grimspace, I knew it was “the book” for me. I just had to find an agent who knew it too. That’s the moral of this story. Believe in yourself. Find someone else who believes in you. And you can do this.

And if you think this was quick for me… well. No, not from inside. But I wanted it so badly that I just never stopped trying. You shouldn’t either, if this is what you want to do. No matter what my first grade teacher said, this is a real job. And it’s what I do.

(After seeing so many other people have fun with this, I wanted to play. If you don’t know how this works, you Google your name, plus needs, and take the first results you come up with. If this looks fun and you wanna do it, consider yourself tagged.)

a spanking. (Okay, maybe a little.)

some Revlon’s Cherries in the Snow, the ho’s lipstick of choice. (Wow, how did you know???)

your help! (It’s true, I do. Won’t you think of the children?)

rehab. (Now that’s a bald-faced lie.)

a stylist. (Probably. I’ll get one before I have my official author photo taken.)

a geography lesson. (Again, how did you know?? This is not my strong suit.)

a friend. (I guess I could use a few more, but not if you expect me to babysit your kids as part of the deal.)

somebody. (This is a little too open-ended…)

to chill. (Not until after I finish this first draft. I’m in production mode, not slacking mode.)

How was that last one for an awesome segue? In other news, Wanderlust has a theme song. I’m playing Beck’s Lost Cause nonstop while I write.

I’ve been working steadily on Wanderlust, which is my working title for Sirantha Jax #2. I’ve finally gotten all the back in the groove, and I had a really wild dream last night that proves it.

See, I dreamed of David Boreanaz. Well, in my dream, I registered him as Angel, even though he wasn’t dressed as Angel. He was hugging me, and we kept kissing and kissing (no it wasn’t that type of dream, sorry) because it wasn’t lust, it was desperation and impending loss. Somewhere along the way, I realized I wasn’t me either. You know how you can be other people in dreams? I wasn’t quite sure who I was while I was dreaming either. He kept burying his face in my neck and telling me he’d come back. I didn’t believe him. All I knew was that I loved him and I didn’t think I’d see him again. At that point he dug into his pocket and pulled out a ring, obviously a cheap piece of costume jewelry, and he shoved it on my finger. He said, “I’ll replace it, I promise.”

And then he strode off through the throng while I watched him go, convinced he was going to his death. We were underground somewhere on a desert world, very Mad Max. Everything was built from scavenged parts, etc and it was grungy, dirty. It’s clear I have to use this scene somewhere in Wanderlust, just not sure where yet.

When I woke up, I was crying. That’s when I realized: that was March and Jax. I’m dreaming from her POV. Woohoo! I’m totally in her head again.

David Boreanaz as March…omg. Swoon. I’d never thought of who he looks like, but my subsconscious knew. It’s perfect. Damn, what a dream, talk about emotionally wrenching. On the bright side, I’m all set to get going on my word count today.

There’s so much I want to say about this movie, but holy crap, if I were to report all the twists, turns, surprises and exciting shit that went on, I’d ruin the whole film for ya’ll. So suffice it say, this movie rocks.

There’s more Captain Jack Sparrow, and he’s Jack-ier than ever. The end will knock your socks off, I’ll wager. I call this the best of the three, and an astonishingly adept conclusion to the trilogy. Go see it. You’ll love it, seriously.

Sirantha Jax #2

6,150 / 90,000 (6.8%)

Progress goes well; I’m so in the groove on this.

My goal is 3K a day for 30 days, no days off, no rest for the wicked, and voila! I have my first draft.

My work is done today, so we’re off to see Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End. Have a great weekend, ya’ll.

Are you ready?

I’ve joined the ranks of the luminaries who write for Ace, such as LKH and Patricia Briggs. Today we finalized a two-book deal with Anne Sowards, who will edit my books. I hear she’s an amazing editor, and I’m thrilled.

Ace was the first choice for my agent and me, and we did it! Laura, to quote Dionne, “is a right rainmaker.” That’s the gospel truth. I signed with her at the end of March. Not even two months later, I have a deal with a major NY publisher, and FALLING (which will likely be retitled before it goes to press) hits the stores in March. It feels like a huge coup getting a book published in NY in under a year! Sirantha Jax #2, currently just a gleam in my eye, comes out September ‘08.

Ace has me on the fast track, and suddenly I need to think about editorial notes and cover art. Cover art! I have deadlines. I’ll be on Publisher’s Marketplace soon, but you heard it here first. Go on and yell about it. Goodness knows I am.

Since I got all deep yesterday, I have to be shallow today to keep the universe in zen balance. Here’s the latest addition to my handbag collection. Cece mentioned on one of my Thursday 13’s that she wanted a camo bag with some girlie touches. Shortly thereafter, I stumbled across this one. Serendipity! I think it’s the cuteness, and the best part(s) about it: a built in change purse, my Ibook fits inside it, and it has compartments for my cell phone and a drink on either side. Plus the strap is exactly the right length. Win!

So yesterday in the car on the way to dinner, I told my husband about another handbag I want, which may or may not be the straw pineapple featured on this blog earlier, and he said with confusion, “Aren’t you pretty well set for bags right now?”

I arched a brow at him. “But honey, I love bags like some women do shoes.” He couldn’t argue that, just sort of nodded and sighed. And then I announced, “I need a special purse closet.”

He nodded again. “I’ll call the carpenter.”

How awesome is he?! It should be noted, we already have a number of projects we want done in the house, not just my purse closet. All the closets need to be redone with more shelving put in, so they’re more space efficient. Andres also wants some bookshelves built in the dining room as we’ve overflowed the ones in the foyer now. I suspect we really need a house with an actual library. When I mention this (and a pool! why not go all the way, when you’re asking for stuff?), he says, “Give me time.”

Again, how awesome is he? If I lived in a house that had a library and a pool on premises, I would be the happiest woman in the world. I’m already pretty close, given how he tolerates my weird mood swings, my tendency to become a hermit when I’m writing, and all the assorted bullshit I do on a regular basis. He even watched How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days with me on Friday night! Sadly I could not persuade him to watch Legally Blonde with me last night. In other news, the girl taught me how to use the TiVo. Woot! Now we can watch Legally Blonde anytime we want (which is actually more often than you might think).

What’s next for the bag lady?

Yes, I want all three.