New submission guidelines! Must Read!

Please use
<-----this
as your guideline for how to deliver a manuscript correctly.

Enticing opening paragraphs

"There was a desert wind blowing that night. It was one of those hot dry Santa Anas that come down through the mountain passes and curl your hair and make your nerves jump and your skin itch. On nights like that every booze party ends in a fight. Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands' necks. Anything can happen. You can even get a full glass of beer at a cocktail lounge."

--Raymond Chandler in Red Wind.

Welcome Amy Minato!

Amy Minato is an Oregon poet and writer. She came to me via the usual pages and SASE in the mail. I fell in love with her work.

Her book, Siesta Lane, is 35,000 words. It's a series of linked stories, meditations, and observations. In other words, it's everything I tell you not to do, or write, or send to me.

And yet...

it's utterly beautiful.

I sent it around to editors I knew would see its beauty. They did. I have a stack of lyrical rejection letters, most of which start with "Janet I love this but it's 35K!"

Then I sent it to Ann Triestman at Skyhorse. She's got an amazing ability to see promise where others saw problems.

She offered, we accepted.

Siesta Lane will be published next year. To get a sense of why I love this book, you can click here to see Amy's spiffy new website.

I love this job, I do!

Why I have not read your partial

Cause I'm a lazy slacker?
Well, normally yes, but recently I've been reading like a fiend, just not YOUR stuff. I've been reading my swag from BEA.

(The bottle of scotch isn't swag, it was a supremely delightful gift from the hilarious Bill Cameron.)

There's a post here at Dead Guy about the books I got

and then I had lunch with Ben Sevier from Dutton and damned if he didn't derail ALL my noble intentions and give me Meg Gardiner's The Dirty Secrets Club.

I'm on page 3, it's 1:48am, and I'm not planning to sleep till I finish.

Email query status

I'm officially caught up on all my email QUERIES. If you queried me, you should have heard back with either no, or a request for pages.

If I requested pages, great, you're back in the slough of despond waiting for me to read.

If you mailed a query, I'm also caught up on those but give it another week if you haven't heard back, the letters went out yesterday.

If you emailed a query and haven't heard back, send it again.

That damn LA sunshine is ruining my NY edge

I'm finding all this happy stuff now. It's getting to be a real problem. Particularly since it's also really sweet.

I need to go file my teeth into points or something and restore my callous cruelty. Sheesh.

No kidding I should leave town more often

Time Out Chicago has a few nice things to say about Dan Tomasulo's ("its' s short sweet page turner") Confessions of a Former Child. The entire review is here.

So, shoot me, I love LA

I hate to admit it cause really, it's so easy to love LA it's almost like saying you love ice cream. What's not to love about that weather! I indulged my inner serpent each day by toasting myself on a rock (or a chair on the patio at the LA Convention Center, which ever was closer).

And the taco truck run with Eric Stone, Ben and Allison from Bleak House was more fun than I've had in quite some time. I truly understand what Californians drive around so much...it's a hoot!

Between looking at the pig mural in Vernon, CA, and the Aimee Semple McPhearson temple in Echo Park, I am now officially a gape-mouthed tourist. T-shirts to come.



More tomorrow after I recover what few wits I did not leave on the show room floor.

Here's some other blog posts elsewhere about BEA:

Jeri Westerson

Kristin Nelson