The Pleasure Of Agency Submissions--Research, Research, Research

Now that I'm submitting my novel, The Color of Safety, to literary agents, and I have begun to enjoy the process. This is because for me, the process if all about research. And I love research.

When I find a book I love, something that is similar to my own, it's fascinating to read other books represented by the same agent, to try to feel if there's a template, an area of interest, or style, and even to understand how widely flung their tastes might be.




This is also a wonderful way to stumble across books that I might not otherwise have picked up. It's almost as though the agent that I am working as become a trusted literary friend, referring me to the very books that I should be reading right now.

Yes, I know this is Martha Gelhorn. I just love the photo.

Then there's the human aspect of the research. Agents, like the rest of us, have lives pasts, ancestors, history. Their parents held different jobs, sometimes in different countries. They have spent time developing interests, and in many cases, passions. As the managing editor of a small press put it to our wonderful master class, "You should be out there stalking these editors and agents before you submit your work to them."

We have so many tools these days, so many ways to learn about people we do not know. Of course, there are interviews in literary places, but even more fun, I find, are old articles about community activism, "How We Mets," in the New York Times, blogs, and twitter feed. In one case, I found two thought-provoking academic pieces by an agent's assistant, (who is likely to become a terrific agent herself), academic writing that was fresh, interesting and funny.

Through this research, those who seemed Powerful Other have become people to me. Fascinating people. I find that far from wanting to get "an" agent, I care deeply about getting this particular agent. I want to have them in my corner for very specific reasons, but I also want to have lunch with them someday, and get to know them more.

And if any particular agent doesn't work out, well, I'll be very disappointed--I always give myself permission to be disappointed by a loss or a failure--but I'll still be richer for all I've read and learned.

What's the submission process like for you? What other tips do you have for submitting a novel to agents? My is literary historical fiction. What's yours?

Research Quandaries, Biographer Battles and Anna Leonowens--which one is right?

Love that hair!

So, I'm reading two biographies of Anna Leonowens. Recent ones. And in many places, they flat-out contradict one another.

One is called Bombay Anna, The Real Story and Remarkable Adventures of the King and I Governess p. 2008 by Susan Morgan. (Distinguished professor of English at University of Miami.) Morgan's writing is fun (so far) In this book, Morgan presents a reasonable view of Anna's life and choices, beginning with upward-rising ancestors, proof of her grandmother's marriage, and a wild, free-range childhood where she her voracious intellect was able to inhale several languages beyond the ones she would have learned at home. She manages to make




The other is: Masked, The Life of Anna Leonowens, Schoolmistress at the court of Siam, by Alfred Habegger, a professor emeritus, again of English, at the University of Kansas, and biographer of Henry James Sr. and Emily Dickinson. Habegger really dislikes his heroine, who he explains with great disdain,  falsified things she wrote about her own past (at a time of such bigotry against being a "half-caste," or in Anna's case, one quarter East-Indian, that it was like being a quadroon (one quarter African) while living as white in high society 1850's New Orleans.

He is also given to saying, with high dudgeon, that none of the other white people dealing with King Monghut thought he was highhanded with them, while neglecting to notice that none of the other people he's mentioning are women, and when he mentions Anna's son, Louis, who was with her in Thailand, writing of his fears of King Monghut, Habegger decides not that there might be a reason for fear in an absolute monarchy where opposition is suppressed, but that his mother's "paranoia" must have affected him. 

And he speaks in the simplest psychologicaleese, something that, in general, irritates the heck out of me. Very few things are that simple. Certainly not Anna Leonowens, King Monghut, or the politics of Siam or America or Britain during the years about which he writes. 

But he seems to have done a tremendous amount of detailed detective work and research, as does Susan Morgan. 

So what do I do when they disagree? 

And would anybody know anything about the Bombay Education Society's School during the years of, say, 1840 to 1855? If you do, I'd love to hear from you.

Would you have any idea of whether or how much an Anglo-Indian East India Army brat might encounter Mohommedans, Parsis--(Zoroastrians originally from Persia) Marathis, thugs (a tribe or gang of criminals known as thuggees, believe it or not) Nautch girls, Turban folders, gold-thread weavers, road sweepers, Brahmins and every cast between, cow patty makers, (or did Anna herself make cow patties to line the walls, burn for fuel, etc?) 

Did Anna join her mother with a group of women washing laundry in the river or lake? 

How the heck can I learn about these things? Even if I could afford to travel to India, Australia, Indonesia and Thailand, I couldn't get to 1840 Poona, a now-destroyed Australian outpost, or the brick house outside the palace from that time. 

Though why anybody who had grown up in the heat of India, lived in Australia's dry heat, and Indonesia's humidity, think that a brick house would make sense for living in in Thailand? 

Any ideas?