Wednesday, August 30

Link-Fu

Have added a new blog, to the delightful Kit Whitfield. British, witty, writes books about werewolves. What's not to love?

She also penned this delightful article about publishing and submitting.

Tuesday, August 29

Eeeeevil Plotting (writing rant #1)

First in a series of promised screeds about writing n' stuff, from a writer who might be published some day!

I thought I'd begin at the beginning, namely the plot. Before you have anything written down, before there's more than a germ of a seed of an idea in your head about story or characters or anything else.

Sometimes, I find, plot will be hidden. Many times I start with a character or a concept I love and build around that. I'll use two examples for the rest of la belle essay:

Prince of Bones, abortive dark fantasy novel.

Night Life, successful urban fantasy novel.

Attempt 1: Prince of Bones was born out of a question I asked myself, namely, "What if Sauron had been the hero of Lord of the Rings? What if Voldemort had vaporized that twit Harry Potter and gone on to become the most powerful wizard evar? What then?" What if the "dark lord" was the central part of the story? I really wanted to answer this burning question and so I started with a central concept of a pagan-ish dark lord oppressed by a good-but-not-really "Christian" regime in the form of an overbearing king person. Lucius, the "dark lord" was marked at birth by the ancient god of death to serve as his avatar during armageddon, the Prince of Bones. He raided villages, had an awesome punk-rock goblin second in command and was generally evil and despicable. However, in the end of the story, he was supposed to defy the death god and save the world. Looking back, a number of things sunk this plot. I was working from not one but two high concepts (dark lord as hero/Christians bad pagans good.) I had a flawed main character, and not in the good way. I had set a task for poor Lucius that he was never going to be able to fulfill. He wasn't the savior of the world. He was the god-damned dark lord! And fun as he was to write, in the end, the world must be saved, or blown up. Sure, you can end with a third option, if you want readers to rip off your head and spit down your neck, but satisfactory resolution is a must, and Lucius wasn't having any of it. Prince of Bones was abandoned at the 35k word mark, although if I ever bridge the chasm of nothingness where a third act should be I may revisit it.

Attempt 2: Night Life came from a crappy blockbuster movie. I, out of a misguided and foolish love for all things Hugh Jackman, journeyed to a movie theater to see Van Helsing. The movie was terrible but I came away thinking, "Hey, it would be really cool to write a badass werewolf protagonist who fights crime! And stuff!" Night Life was the exact opposite of Prince. Luna, the character, came first and stood around poking me in the arm until I wrote her a world to live in. And the world did not come easily. First, Luna lived alone, with no family except for a dead grandmother who had raised her. Then Luna became a private detective, not a cop, and had an obsessive-compulsive vampire partner. Then she was a cop again, only werewolves were a super seekrit society that no humans knew about. Then everyone knew. Then some people. At this point, I decided there needed to be magic. And demons. And a love interest who wasn't really interested in her at all in the first draft of the novel that eventually won me representation. The sole reason Night Life came into being was because Luna would. Not. Shut. Up. Luna had a plot. She knew exactly where she'd end up at the finale of the book. It was getting her there that was the bitch.

I learned from both projects. Prince taught me that yeah, not outlining is all fine and good and freespirited, but you can't make a weak third act into a gripping climax no matter how cool your concept is. Details and concept must work in tandem, like those people movers at the airport, so that they don't trip over one another and result in small children getting sucked into the gears. If a concept just isn't working for me, I've been doing this long enough to realize that I probably need to tilt it at a different angle and/or leave the project be for a few days and rethink my committment. Night Life proved the old adage that great characters do not a great story make. There needs to be some actual story, and not just a generic Plot-o-Matic plot either. (There's one for every genre!) Again, the whole working in tandem concept comes into play.

One last thing about plotting...start writing. If you get an idea, try banging out the first few pages. I've ditched more crappy plots this way than I could tell. If the writing isn't fun, if it doesn't flow out of you (even if it's crappy) you have a clunker concept behind it. Save yourself the pain and do a practice first page when that germ of a seed of a thought pops into your noggin. If you're totally OCD and outline everything first, writing a nice narrative-style outline serves the same purpose.

And just in case anyone was wondering where my ideas generally come from...everywhere. Movies. Songs. Other books (usually nonfiction.) Paintings and photographs. A lot of them happen while I'm in the shower or vacuuming or doing some other mundane task that frees my brain from immediate worries. Sometimes I'll have moments of "Wouldn't it be cool if..." and boom, a story idea springs from that.

Here endeth the evil plots.

Thursday, August 24

I was going to put a snappy alliterative title here, but I couldn't think of anything.

There is seriously nothing worth writing about going on with me right now, so I've decided that I'd like to write a series of how to/rambling/ranty/insert word of choice here pieces on writing, submissions and stuff.

Since I don't pretend to know everything (I'm a Virgo, so I secretly think I DO know everything, I'm just too insecure to say it) I'd like to keep this really open-ended, with the actual entries being MY thoughts and MY opinions/experiences, going to the comment section so everyone who reads here can add their collective wisdom. Because let's face it, unpublished authors who try to give writing advice as if it were the be-all, end-all of writing advice just come off as pretentious gits.

I have a variety of topics in mind, some of them standard (queries, plotting) and some more off-beat (the internet writing community, scams) but if there's anything specifically you-all would like to discuss, please leave a comment here and I'll add it to the list.

Also, feel free to tell me I am, in fact, a pretentious git and to just abandon the whole idea and write about what I had for dinner last night.*


*Bruscetta

Tuesday, August 22

Villain or Antihero? (With a side trip into those Chucky movies)

X-posted.

So after a long weekend of being a total lazy-butt and driving around the Tillamook State Forest, eating candy bars and pausing occasionally to jump in the Wilson River and kick-start my heart (melted ice is good swimmin'!) I return with a semi-rambling (okay, having looked the entire post over it's TOTALLY rambling) treatise on some writing type stuff.

I love villains. I crazy-love them. Oftentimes, in my stories, I love them more than the hero or heroine, and in most print and visual media I root for the villains WAY more than the heros. (Case in point: I'm a huge fan of Batman: the Animated Series but I'll only watch episodes that feature the Joker because I [heart] him so much.)

So last night I was watching Bride of Chucky on the SciFi channel, because my VHS tape is lost somewhere in the morass of moving and moving again and losing half my stuff each time. Before anyone starts sniggering at me, go re-watch Child's Play and Child's Play 2 (run screaming away from #3) and tell me they are not kick-ass horror movies which have, if nothing else, a concept unique enough to encompass voodoo, killer dolls and Brad Dourif.

While I was watching, I got to thinking--the Chucky character undergoes a slow transformation across the three films from icky, evil one-dimensional serial killer to someone you might spend time with, if only from a morbid interest in who he'll slaughter next. I have to believe this is a deliberate thing, because Don Mancini, the original director/creator, had a hand in all three films. It brings up an interesting point--when does your villain stop being a villain and start being the closet hero of the story? And can this work in written fiction?

I think, as a rule, it's harder in books than it is on the screen. Writers have to work harder to show nuanced transformation and multi-layered character motivation. Hannibal Lecter was a villain through and through, someone who fascinated you but that if you met alone in a dark alley, would make you piss yourself and run the other way. The Joker (since he appears both in print and on the screen) is a villain but also a fascinating personality that you'd probably spend time with, because he's exciting and crazy and keeps the fun coming. Crossing that line just enough to push readers from being disgusted and horrified to secretly wanting more is a fine art, one that I'd love to master but haven't yet.

The villains in my stories usually end up being tragic, because I've found I can't write straight baddies--they bore me. Even my villains are usually just cardboard villains, and someone else is the real Bad Guy. In a future novel I have planned, though, I finally have a baddie I can take from being straight evil to antihero. Although, if you're weird like me, straight evil may be your thing.

Which do you prefer? Which do you write? Has a villain ever tapped you on the shoulder and said "Dude, I am totally the star of this book and there ain't a damn thing you can do about it"?

Most importantly, is Brad Dourif anyone else's secret boyfriend after watching him on Deadwood? (Now you all know my secret celebrity obsession, and can mock me roundly. I grant permission.)

5 questions for aspiring authors to ask (themselves)

X-posted on Street Magic.

1. Am I able to handle rejection?

Be honest. Rejection hurts, because writing is an intensely personal endeavor. If you take rejection as a personal affront rather than a critique of some element of your writing, you may need to practice with baby steps (short story, magazines, writing group critiques) before sending your MS to agents and editors. Personal feedback from an industry pro is something to be treasured, unless you're really, really sure they were stoned out of their gourds when they read your book. If you can't seperate the feedback from the rejection yet, you're already shooting yourself in the foot.

2. Can I work with my eventual agent/editor on a professional level?

Unpublished writers have the greatest luxury of all--they can work on an MS at their own pace, any way they please. They can experiement with style, voice and genre until they get it just right. Writers on the road to publication must be able to make deadlines, apply feedback from their editor and their agent, and complete contracted projects no matter what. If you're contracted for a 3-book SF deal, you better believe you won't be delving into that historial romance you want to write until your editor has signed off on your SF novels. Rachel talks more extensively about writing in multiple genres.

3. Have I done every last possible thing to polish my work, to the best of my ability?

I know I harp on this one, but it is SO important to polish your work. Polish it until you're sick of it. Send it out to a writing group or Critters or your best writer friend and then edit it some more. Repeat with your query letter, synopsis, ect. This is what is going to elevate you above the slush pile, and it is hard. Frigging. Work. Ask yourself seriously if you will give up nights, weekends, significant others, gaming, shopping, whatever your preferred pastimes are, in favor of making your work publishable.

4. If a potential agent/editor Googles my name, will anything embarrassing come up?

Yeah, you may not think about this, and I didn't until I realized that potential agents were Googling me, but they sure were. Fortunately, I don't post my spring break pictures on MySpace...but the Internet is forever, so that Sailor Moon fanfiction you posted way back when? Agents are gonna see it. Your blog railing against how mean agents are? They're gonna see it. Do your career a favor and self-Google before you start submitting.

5. Have I researched my genre and determined my book's market to the best of my ability?

This one is tricky, because genre can flip-flop at almost any point in the publishing process (at least until your cover comes out!) But knowing what genre most closely matches your novel, which agents rep that genre, who the major players are, which well-known authors to compare your book to, and how your writing stacks up against published work gives you a huge leg up. This one is easy--go to the bookstore or the library, find the stacks for your appropriate genre and start reading. Amazon is also your friend.

---

I know I haven't been a diligent blogger lately, but there is seriously nothing to report on the book front. I may have to post about (gasp) real!live!life!

Wednesday, August 16

Represented! Part 2

X-POSTED on Street Magic

Now that the initial OMG!!!one!! shock of signing with the fabulous Rachel Vater has worn off, I wanted to put up the promised post of how, exactly, this even came about. (And holy crap, did that sentence have a lot of commas or what?)

To start off, I know that in my initial "Squee!" post on Blogger I noted that it took me about 3 1/2 weeks to sign with an agent after my intial query went out. Don't be jealous. Really, don't be. Behind that 3 1/2 weeks was nearly 10 months of writing, re-writing, polishing query letters and researching agents and markets to prepare a sub list that was right for my book. Most writers who get rejected do not do this amount of prep work. They have an MS, they rewrite it (hopefully) and start a-querying. Then again, some writers with phenomenal books never land an agent or a deal. Publishing is, by its very nature, an industry of being in the right place at the right time with a great story. I happened to write an urban fantasy novel, which happens to be hothothot right now. I'll let you in on a secret, though:

I started writing the novel that got me an agent two years ago. The first draft was started in 2004. Was urban fantasy hot in 2004? Yes, but it had yet to explode in the way it's doing right now. Would the first incarnation of the book have gotten me signed? Hell no. It was awful. I was still feeling out the characters, worldbuilding, plotting. I started the MS three different times before draft #4 finally became a complete book. It took me six months to write the first draft. It was still awful.

I sat down and rewrote this monster for three months. Three months is a long time for re-writes, unless you set the book down and pick it up again later. We're talking 3 solid months of rewriting the plot, solidifying the worldbuilding and wrestling the damn thing into a form that made sense to the world at large.

Only when I was absolutely sure that I had a draft that would sell did I start querying. And it was so hard. There were so many moments during revisions when I wanted to declare the book finished, fire up my email and send out query letters. I loved my book, and I wanted everyone else to love it too. Fortunately, my fear of utter humiliation should an agent actually request to read my unpolished words kept my fingers off the SEND button.

Once I was prepared to query, with a complete MS, I turned to a member of my writing group who had already landed an agent. She did a critical read of my query letter and made me shorten it. A lot. Now, again, don't be jealous. There are many, many places on the web to get query help, and many of the helpers are editors or published writers themselves. I just happened to have a direct line, but if I hadn't, I would have simply used a public site like Evil Editor. I felt comfortable writing a synopsis by myself, but again, there are many places to get advice and help with synopsis-writing, which--to be fair--totally sucks. The damn synopsis took me about three days, and it was only a page and a half.

Anyway, now I was ready to start querying! I developed a sub list using Publisher's Marketplace and AgentQuery, as well as recommendations from friends who had queried before (I actually ended up querying Rachel because Holly told me to.) I sorted the list by agents who accepted fantasy and could be e-queried, leaving the snail queries for the second tier except for Ginger Clark, who's PM listing cracked me up so much I just HAD to query her in the first sweep. I sent out 12 queries in the first wave, and two more piecemeal (including Rachel's!) as I amassed rejection and/or got impatient waiting for reads. Staggering queries a bit is a VERY smart idea, because it not only gives you something to look forward to, you're not faced with that long wasteland of wait time once agents from Wave 1 have your MS and are reading it.

The intial wave of 11 garnered 7 requests for partials/fulls within 2 days. Email is good, cheap and fast, and I would ALWAYS e-query before spending money on snail mail, unless one of your dream agents only takes snail. In that case, send the snail query first, and wait about a week before firing off your e-queries so that hopefully the timeframe for most of the agents will be roughly the same.

I sent off the 7 requests the very next day, using mostly flat-rate Priority Mail envelopes. (If you're broke and need to get requested materials to agents fast, flat-rate Priority mail is your best friend. You can cram about 200 manuscript pages into a flat-rate envelope and it will cost $4.05 no matter what the weight.) Once the materials were in the mail, I waited. And waited. A week is a very long time when you're biting your nails for an agent's response.

My first rejection came in, a nice personal email with a critique after reading the full. My second rejection was via SASE, form from a partial. Third was based on the query--the agent didn't handle urban fantasy. Out of the 5 agents that still had the partial/full, 2 expressed enough interest to call me and discuss the MS. By this time, I'd gotten two more requests (one from Rachel!) and was still actively querying, sending one out every few days to keep my mind off of The Waiting.

Then, for a week, nothing. This, again, is characteristic of writing and the publishing industry--frantic periods of activity followed by long periods of radio silence. During this long week I found Rachel's blog and sent her a nice email asking if I could put the link on Blogger because I thought her query-letter posts were valuable for writers going through the process. I was polite and professional and non-stalkerish, and made sure to indicate I wanted to link her blog no matter how the manuscript review went.

The following Monday, Rachel called me and indicated she wanted to offer representation. After the shock wore off I Googled her other clients, read some of their journals, including Melissa Marr, and was convinced that she was the agent for me (really, I knew as soon as we started to talk about the book in our intial conversation that morning.)

But, and this is a huge 'but'--I did I the professional thing and notified all agents who were still reading of the offer. I got one other offer as a result of this, from a very good agent who wanted some fairly major revisions done on the MS. Then came the really hard thinking. If you get two offers from agents, the only thing you can really do is weigh how well your visions mesh, because no agent can guarantee multi-book deals and huge advances. However, I did look at Rachel's deals on PM, and satisfied that she could do right by my book and that our visions were extremely compatible, I called her the next morning and accepted her offer.

I'd be happy to expand on any of this, or hear any addendums/comments.

Tuesday, August 15

Representin'

If my loyal readers (all 4 of you) will look to the right of your screen, you will notice a small but significant change in my profile.

I have an agent.

As of 7:45 PST this morning, I'm represented by the incomparable Rachel Vater of the Lowenstein-Yost agency. Rachel has a phenomenal background in publishing, including a stint with Donald Maass, and many, many deals this year alone...and she LOVES my book.

I just wanted to thank everyone for their support and their excitement, which matches mine--but not quite. This is still a bit surreal for me...all told, it was only about 3 1/2 weeks since querying my first agent to getting representation. 3 1/2 weeks, in the book world, is an eye blink.

It's crazy. I'll post more when this has all sunk in, but I know I promised you a query-letter post once the agent thing had shaken out, and since it has...I'll link you to Rachel's post instead, using my query letter to her as an example.

Queries 101 by Rachel, featuring Caitlin's query

More soon!

Saturday, August 12

BMW Stats for Saturday

Words: 607 (screw that counter thingy, it doesn't even work with Blogger.)

Favorite sentence: "Lia put her deck back into its box and slammed the lid shut, favoring Mari with a glare that bounced off the redhead’s forcefield of perfection like a ping-pong ball."

Writer's Mood: Excited. Lia gets The Phonecall in this scene, and things crank up from there.

Least favorite thing: 3rd person limited POV. It's so weird to write this, I feel like everything is wooden and over-described.

Next scene: Jenny shows up at Lia's house. The there's a mage death squad.

Word goal for tomorrow: 1000. Let's not strain the writer.

Story time

Jessica's post in her journal about how she came to write got me thinking about my own weirdo journey, so since it's been a slow day in book-land (500 words on BMW, wowie!) I thought I'd blog about this.

It's Nancy Drew's fault. I started reading her books about age 7 or so, and became completely hooked. Nancy introduced me to her pals the Hardy Boys, who in turn led to Robert Heinlein and the wide world of science fiction and fantasy. By the time I was 11, I had devoured every Nancy Drew book out there and completed a mystery novel about two friends who live on a ranch out west (I was also really into horses, cowboys, Robin Hood and pirates but that all comes into play later) and who solve the mystery of a Wild West outlaw's lost treasure. It was cringe-worthy, but I finished it! And a sequel where they go to a rodeo and some nefarious person tries to knock the heroine out of the Big Race.

At 13 I discovered Star Wars and the world of being a complete and utter geek. If anyone remembers my Scorecard post, I wrote a Star Wars tie-in novel which, while not horrible for a 13-year-old, was nowhere near polished. This was my first experience with plotting, writing and characterization from A-Z, and it was so difficult, frustrating and time-consuming I just had to keep doing it.

The completion of the knockoff novel led to a long detour into fanfiction, that, while varied and exciting in it's own way, served as little more than practice (and not very good practice at that.) Fanfic writing did teach me one valuable thing--to take criticism, sometimes of the vicious variety. For this reason alone, I believe that most fanfic writers who transition to professionals are better-equipped to query agents, try to find a publisher and eventually deal with professional reviewers when they get published.

During the same time period I decided that I was going to be a screenwriter and completed three screenplays, two about cyborgs (that just sort of happened) and one a western. The western ended with a train careening into a gorge and exploding! in! a! fireball! Good times.

I picked up an original novel project again as an expansion on a piece of fanfiction. A paranormal romance, the first thing I had ever tried with a significant romantic sub-plot. It was co-written with a good friend of mine who is also a talented writer, and we got about 130 pages into it before the plot stalled, teaching me the hard lesson that no matter how much you love your characters, without a plot, they might as well be sitting around in a piece of literary fiction clipping their toenails and talking about The Meaning of Existence. (I still love you, Petunia and John, and one day your story will get written.)

Around this time (I was a sophomore in college) I wrote an original 3-part manga series with an artist friend of mine for a mythology class. It was a lot of fun and somewhere along the way the fact nudged it's way into my brain that writing would never again be a back-burner enterprise. I would always have to put it first, because such is the nature of the beast. I began to try writing this quirky werewolf/police procedural novel that had been tickling my brain, but after 3 drafts I set it aside in frustration and moved on.

After two quarters in my senior year of fiction-writing classes, one of which was a mystery writing course that was the best program I've ever taken and one a dull-as-dirt literary fiction/narrative nonfiction class (which taught me a ton about what NOT to do, so valuable in its own right) I started a fantasy novel that had been bugging me for a while. I pitched it as "What if Sauron was the hero of the story?". PRINCE OF BONES made it to page 135 before collapsing under the weight of its own concept.

Right after I gave up on PRINCE I sold a short story to an e-zine and started to think that hey, maybe my writing didn't suxxors after all and I wasn't deluding myself that I could make a career-style go of this. For NaNoWriMo 2005, I started a psychological thriller that got to about 5 pages before I realized that I was re-writing Silence of the Lambs and looked for something else to dust off. I looked at my folder of old WIPs. I saw that quirky werewolf novel and remembered that my idea for the plot wasn't half-bad. I started typing in the last week of November and finished NIGHT LIFE in April of 2006. Then I re-read it and found huge chunks didn't make sense, the story was weak, and there were massive inconsistencies. But it was DONE.

For about a month, I despaired that I could fix the book, that it would become my trunk novel and I'd have to do this all over again before I could think about publication. Fortunately, I happened to catch Underworld on cable and decided that, even if it never got published, NIGHT LIFE's werewolves could do better than that. I printed out the zero draft and seperated all the scenes, noting where additions needed to be made or crappy parts needed to be excised. Three months later, I had beaten the manuscript into submission and it was complete with plot, character, theme, movement and voice. I gave myself one week of querying and started on my next Idea-That-Wouldn't-Die, BLACK MAGICK WOMAN. As my avid (hah) readers know, NIGHT LIFE has been getting a good response from queries and partial reads, so hope springs eternal.

The best is yet to come. (I hope. I'm fairly sure. It would really suck if I peaked at 21.)

Friday, August 11

Be a plot machine - ask me how!

Things were good. Plugging along on BMW, excited about it.

Then, today, I had yet another idea spring fully formed from my brow. Now, this almost never happens to me. I agonize over plotting. I make notes, I talk to writing friends, I revise and revise before anything goes on paper. Yet, the following happened:

HERO TIME
Sentenced to community service for accidentially allowing super-villain Retroactive vaporize the top of the Space Needle, super-heroine Insight is assigned to babysit a team of "Auxies" (auxilary heros.) Her life couldn't possibly get any worse, until Retroactive devises a way to give normal people superpowers. Outnumbered in a city that now sees Retro as a savior, Insight has to turn her team of wannabes into hero material--fast. As if things weren't complicated enough, she must also choose between her cute/sensitive/white night teammate and the dangerous/bad/not allowed! attraction she seems to be developing towards Retroactive.

Yeah, I may be cracked, but I'd be interested if my (2.5) loyal readers had opinions about which plot summary reads as more enjoyable to them, because let's face it, we're all in this to sell something. Someday.

Thoughts?

Thursday, August 10

Link-Fu

Please do visit the informative blog of the fabulous Rachel Vater, Lit Agent X. You'll laugh, you'll snort drinks out your nose, you'll be glad you didn't write some of those query letters she gets...

Wednesday, August 9

How not to be my housemate/How not to get an agent

If no one minds, I do have a Real!Live!Life and sometimes we all need a break from writing and querying (at least, waiting for a reply to my reply to that revision email, I know I do.) A lot of what I'm dealing with right now can be applied to writing as well, in the process of writing a book and getting an agent.

Now I'd really like to know what that nice agentperson thought of my revision reply.

(Note to self: Nail chewing, while theraputic, has no nutritional value.)

So, one of my housemates recently vacated and I'm trying to fill her room up. Here's a primer on how to fill this slot:

1. Don't be on crack
Literally, please don't be on crack. Also, please don't wait to tell me about your recent recovery/addiction until you're in my home viewing the room. Don't talk about your probation officer. Don't put on cheap perfume to cover up the fact you've been drinking and scare my cats away.

2. Don't be a single, straight 30-year-old white male
I'm a single, straight woman and I've seen WAY too many episodes of Law & Order: SVU to feel comfortable with THAT scenario.

3. Don't move your significant other into my home on the sly
Because I will notice that shirtless, incommunacative male eating my last yogurt straight from the carton.

4. Don't be this guy:
Message to Seller:

Still available? Straight male, looking to leave a failed relationship.
I have terrible credit but a great job. I work for the state so I know
I always have a paycheck. Let me know what you think.

5. Don't leave bags of garbage in your room and pretend you can't smell that.
I know you can. I think the cats may be dead from it.


Now consider for a moment how this applies to publishing, and how five housemate mistakes translate into five querying/writing mistakes:

1. Don't use common sense and don't research the industry to know what's acceptable.
2. Don't know who reps your genre. Agents love getting random queries addressed to 5 other people.
3. Lie or be furtive about past (POD) publishing mistakes, writing credits or lack thereof.
4. Don't be professional, instead of confessional.
5. Don't polish your work, because agents can't see typos.

I'd be interested to see comments or addendums.

BMW Stats

A whopping 3-page chapter about graverobbing. No fun stuff yet...got to get a bit more meat.

Another note: after writing close first person Chandler-style narration, third person POV is weird, man.

'Zokutou'Zokutou
545 / 90,000
(0.6%)

Tuesday, August 8

A post not about querying

My second full!length! novel is poised to begin. Urban fantasy, like the last but with a much darker tone (if that's possible) and much less paranormal romance-y elements.

In case anyone cares, a summary:

BLACK MAGICK WOMAN
Sisters Jenny and Amelia Threadstone have been seperated for fifteen years, ever since the day their white-witch mother took Amelia and went on the run from their black-mage father. Now, their father is dead and his old "friends" are after the last two scions of the Threadstone line. Jenny and Amelia must discover what forbidden magick Albert Threadstone discovered before he died, and why his former allies would kill for it. And Amelia must reconcile her feelings towards her very powerful and possibly evil necromancer sister, while coming to terms with her own abilities as Albert's daughter. Jenny and Lia may not get along, but even gifted witches can't ignore fate...

I'm excited about starting something that has minimal romantic angst and tons of good solid story. I even got me a spiffy word counter:

'Zokutou
0 / 90,000
(0.0%)



So look forward to not only query posts, but metrics posts! Can you stand it???!!!

It's gone to phone calls...

AKA Yet Another Query Update.

So yeah, lots of excitement today. My poor lil' heart is all aflutter. While at work doing work-like thyings, I got two phone calls.

Call #1
Obsessively checking email. See that I have voicemail on my Vonage home phone number. (I [heart] Vonage.) Check caller ID and see a 212 area code. Listen to voice message. Big 5 agent asking me to call to talk about book. Contain shriek, take down number and head outside to call back. As I am walking the phone rings with a different 212 number.

Call #2
Another, different agent calling to talk about book. Is a super-duper fancy-nice guy and asks me to let him finish reading the MS before I accept any offers. Since he is, in fact, super-duper fancy-nice I say sure and do a spontaneous boogie in the car park. Get some weird looks from other people on their cell phones in the car park. Who cares?!

Call #1 part the second
Call the first agent back and we talk about the MS. She likes it but has concerns and we end with her sending me a revision email to look over and decide how well our visions mesh.

Dude, I'm freaking out...

Monday, August 7

Queries #2-11 update the fifth

Nothing like a rejection to start off a Monday, eh?

Got kicked to the curb with a form reject by a certain agency in the Sunshine State.

Nothing personal, nothing between the lines, just a standard "Too familiar" form reject.

Oh well. Onward and all that. Still have 7 (or is it 8? Crap, I forgot.) agents looking over the partial/full.

We'll see.

Sunday, August 6

Queries #12-14 update

Got a request for an e-full from query #13 today, which salved the sting of Big 5's rejection.

Agent 13 asked, as a courtesy, to be notified of who else was considering NIGHT LIFE and when I sent her my list (of 9 agents) she replied "Wow, that's a lot of agents...I'll have to read fast!"

Hellz yeah.

We'll see.

Queries 2-11 update the fourth

Got a rejection from one of my Big 5 agents this evening.

However, rather than tearing out my hair and sobbing, my spirits were actually lifted a little bit.

-He wrote to me on a Sunday night, traditionally one of those pesky "weekend" days when agents hibernate and don't answer email.
-He included a short but comprehensive critique of the novel including some fairly glowing comments.
-He read the whole thing.
-It was a personal rejection, which I'm sure all of you know is rare as crap and to be highly prized.
-The basic message of the reject was "It's not you, it's me", which I found oddly sweet.

I'll post his name once this query thing is all said and done, but this agent is a stand-up guy and anyone who writes epic fantasy would be lucky-lucky-lucky to land him.

Friday, August 4

Query #15

Okay, so I lied. I sent out one more partial along with the infamous queries 2-11 that got requested at Writer's Weekend. Forgot all about it until just now when an email popped asking for a full.

We'll see, and also, Yay!

Queries #12-14

Broke the mold and got a reject by e-mail just now, not a form letter. To be fair, the agent represents mostly epic fantasy and didn't type YOU SUXXORS in huge red caps, so no biggie. Onward and upward and all that jazz.

Queries 12 and 13 were by snail mail and web site form, respectively. The snail query was to an agent whom I'd really love to work with (which is why I ponied up the $4.05 for a priority envelope to query her along with my e's,) so I'm prepared to wait a while for a response.

We'll see.

Thursday, August 3

... Writerapathy

Every now and then I hit little roadbumps of apathy on my life path, where pretty much all I can do is show up at work, drive back home and lay on the bed watching Law & Order: SVU before passing out. Chores pile up. My friends think I died. My over-active brain screams for a workout but the computer is a whole two steps from the bed and that pen is heavy!

Having struggled with clinical depression (like many famous and/or dead writers) from the time I was about 19 until last year, I know these hollows and valleys well...I used to live in them permanently. Fortunately, I've come to realize that now, when I am healthy, I still cycle rapidly from productive to lazy-ass and I've yet to find the perfect method for equilibrium. I lack discipline, and I own up to that with a resigned sigh. Some day, I will put my Butt in Chair (TM) for two hours a day and write. I will practice my instruments regularly and pay my bills on time. I won't disappear on people who care about me for days at a time.

I've also come to realize that fixing my still-depression-wounded brain is going to happen in tiny steps, not in a sweep of sudden perfection that will turn me into Martha Stewart with a fiction contract. I wish things happened that way, but they don't, and no matter how tired and grumped out I am at the end of the day, baby steps have to occur so life doesn't implode and I lose my ability to maintain altogether.

And now, it's time to take the baby-step of cutting selfreflective angst and get back to work on the day job.

Wednesday, August 2

Queries #2-11 update the third

'Nother request for a 50-page partial, bringing the count to 7/10.

New character blog

Please do visit Cat and Muse, in which Jezebel, the heroine of Hell's Belles, interviews other spec fic/paranormal romance heroines and heros, including, if she ever snags an agent, our very own Det. Luna Wilder.

Tuesday, August 1

Query #2-11 update, plus an aside...

Got a request for 5 pages off a query-only email, so that brings total requests from unsolicited queries to 6-ish. I'll count it fully if the nice agent-person asks to see a partial or the whole book.

I don't know if a huge number of people other than the authors I have linked to the right read this blog, but in case anyone out there in Interweb land was wondering, I'm not making these posts to brag. I'm not making them to stroke my ego. I'm not doing it to point a "neener neener" finger at those who haven't had as much fortune agent-wise as I have.

I'm doing it to show that it IS possible for unpublished/unknown writers to get requests (and hopefully repped) off of querying the old-fashioned way. Sure, going to cons and knowing published writers HELPS, but the majority of my requests came from straight querying, with no more familiarity between the agent and I than "Hey, I saw in your profile on AgentQuery that you rep XXX genre. My novel is in XXX genre, want to take a look?"

Once this query-go-round (thanks to Jackie for the catchphrase) has been spinning a little longer I'll do the obligatory post on good query practices, but right now I just want to say: don't listen to people who tell you that new authors can't get repped, sold, or published unless they're doing John Grisham's laundry (or just doing John Grisham, period.) Don't listen to people who feed you misinformation because they're bitter about the publishing industry not bending and doing things their way to recognize their brilliant novel. Those people are full of crap.

There's no silver bullet to getting an agent. Seriously, there isn't. Write a good novel, write a better query letter, and if you have the money to spare go impress the hell out of a few industry pros at a convention or two. Try to build some short fiction credits if you can, it helps. Do these things and 99.9% of the time things will occur as they should.

Just saying.

Updated to add that nice agent-person #6 asked for a full based on the 5 pg. sample.

Queries #2-11

Sent out 10 more queries this past Friday via email, because I am a) broke and b) slightly lazy.

Had some much-needed assistance from Jackie, who not only named a character in her forthcoming paranormal romance after me, but kicked my query letter into shape and helped me build my submissions list. You should all go buy Hell's Belles right this second. Seriously. I'll wait.

(Oh, and go to her web site as well: http://www.jackiekessler.com )

Back? Fan-freakin-tastic.

Queries #2-11 were all e-queries, one solicited, 10 unsolicited. Metrics follow.

Total submissions: 11
# solicited: 1
# unsoliticed: 10 (7 query letters, 3 queries w/writing samples)

Requested: 6
# requested that also contained a sample: 2 (out of 3, proving with a huge sigh of relief on A Vampire's part that her writing doesn't totally suck.)
# of fulls: 2 from unsoliticed queries, 1 by agent's request w/o query.
# of partials: 3 from unsoliticed queries (although one partial was 100 pages, hardly a small chunk of the work.)

I was, frankly, AMAZED at the response time of these lovely people. I sent out my query batch Thursday evening and Friday morning there were 5 heart-stopping emails sitting in my inbox. I had prepared my admittedly impatient self to wait weeks, if not months, for any sort of nibble. I had to clamp a hand over my mouth when I opened my Yahoo! account from work and saw all the replies.

So yeah. The "Requested Material"s are currently winging their way east in the tender hands of priority mail.

We'll see.

About the Writer

  • Luna
  • Nocturne City
  • I've been a homcide detective in Nocturne City for two years and a werewolf for a good bit longer than that. I wasn't born this way, but now it's who I am. Sure, balancing my work life and keeping my secret from almost everyone I care about can be stressful, but after a few full moons a girl learns how to deal--or at least how to accessorize for fur, fangs and claws.
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