Almost ready

Last week I sent my very first query letter to the agent I'll be meeting on Saturday, Anita Mumm of the Nelson Literary Agency. She wrote back the other day saying she was looking forward to meeting me, too, and that she was going to save my query until after we talk. She wrote that she thinks my book sounds intriguing! Oh, how I hope I can impress her on Saturday.

In the meantime I'm working on my synopsis and coming up with chapter titles. I've never been much good with titles, and so I tend to follow advice given long ago: find them in the work.

The first chapter, for example, I've decided on A Most Disquieting Loneliness, which comes from a quote by Alex Haley, the author of Roots: "Haley also described what happens when, for whatever reason, we are denied the stories of our selves, “Without this enriching knowledge, there is a hollow yearning.  No matter what our attainments in life, there is a vacuum and emptiness and a most disquieting loneliness."'

Chapter Two is going to be My Real Mother? which is from the first paragraph: “I hate her,” I said.  I hated my real mother.  I was five and I didn’t know what a real mother was, but the little girl I was playing with told me we were both adopted and then she asked how I felt about my real mother.  She was older than I was, perhaps eight or nine, and she parroted her parents’ words, “She loved you enough to give you up.”  Who loved me enough to give me up?  I was given up?  For all I knew, my mother was sitting in their kitchen drinking coffee with her mother. I had no idea who she was talking about."

Chapter Three will be Like Meeting a Stranger, which comes from the first adoptee I'd ever met who had actually been reunited:
“So, you just found your birthmother?”
“Yes, up in Vermont.  It wasn’t here.”
“Oh, how was it?  How did it go?"
“It was okay.”
Getting information out of her was going to take work.  And so far this wasn’t the information I was expecting to hear.  Like Faye, this adoptee wasn’t going to give me any false hope.
“Oh?  But what was it like?”
“It was like meeting a total stranger.  We talked together some.  She answered all my questions, and we got everything cleared up.”
I waited for her to say more, to say that since then they’d talked every week on the phone and that they were making plans to get together soon.  I must have looked discouraged.
“I think we might be friends later on though,” she said finally.

And While I Wait for the fourth chapter, which actually contains more of what I learned while I was waiting than anything about my story:
Reform in the United States began in 1851 when the Massachusetts Adoption of Children Act was passed.  Some observers felt that adoption was more acceptable in America because of our “melting pot” tradition.  Relationships created intentionally, they felt, were stronger, even more American, than relationships created merely by blood.  Regardless, “baby farming” became a profitable business and babies relinquished or abandoned to such institutions often died of disease and neglect.  The “farmers” made money coming and going, first through the extortion of pregnant women in desperate circumstances, and then by milking desperate adoptive parents for huge sums of money.
One report from the 1910s revealed that children in Chicago could be bought for $100, with an installment plan available for parents who needed to spread out their payments.  Most of the children were sent out of state, but no one was asking any questions.  The report also revealed that newspaper advertising was used extensively.  One “baby farmer” advertized, “It’s cheaper and easier to buy a baby for $100.00 than to have one of your own.”  When reformers successfully stamped out advertising, commercial adoption all but stopped.

Do you find this portion interesting?

Do these titles give you an indication of what might be in the chapter? Do you like chapter titles in general? Some people do - some don't - some don't care at all.