Week in Review 3/29/15

 

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Last week's week in review had Jennifer F. Donohue asking about one of my favorite topics: paint!

Did you repaint the office? Did I miss what colors you'd selected? We've got paint chips up in the circulation room of the library, but no consensus yet. One of the orange-y colors was called "Pompeii Clay", which I thought perhaps not in good taste, but I found a nice gray to pair with it (they did not call it "Vesuvius Ashfall"). My coworkers do not agree

we DID repaint the office and the color was my new fave: Montgomery White.

I haven't taken pictures yet cause it's still not completely pulled together. Soon though, soon!

Christina Seine's new notebook has a quote I like very much:

The very first thing I wrote in it was a line I heard today while watching the "Best Exotic Marigold Hotel" - (to paraphrase): "Everything is going to work out alright in the end. If it is not alright, then it is not the end yet."

And it turns out that Amy Schaefer, while not liking acronyms much, has a some pretty good ones;

"...but of course, the EFI report was bogged down with the AWT--"
"What does EFI mean?" I asked. I already knew the answer to this question.
"Extremely Frigging Important. Then Charlie--"
"And AWT?"
"Awesome Wonder Team."
"Right. Carry on."

Kate Larkindale makes a good point that applies to people just starting a "new career" as writers:

I've just started a new job, and after 23 years at the finished end of the film production chain, going back to the beginning of it has been like learning a new language.

Publishing vernacular can be rare and strange indeed. Even for people who have been "in books" or a career that was a different kind of writing can be bewildered by all sorts of terms.

I'm reminded of this every time a query writer writes that s/he wants me to "review" a book.

On Monday the discussion turned to the value of a blurb offer in a query letter.

Colin asked:

My question for QOTKU, therefore, is: How does blurbing work? How do publishers know they're going to get good reviews from the people they ask to blurb? Do they ever get blurbers write back saying "Sorry, I hated this book. I can't give you a positive blurb." I would like to think so."

No one knows what kinds of blurbs they're going to get. Generally the unspoken protocol is that if you don't like the book, you say you don't have time now to read for a blurb.  You do NOT trash it.  Well, you can, but it would be very very rude.  And unless it's hilariously funny, a bad blurb would never be used on a book.

That said, I've used some VERY bad reviews in subsequent press releases (earlier in my career) because it was very clear that the reviewer had missed the point of the book completely. 

and bass points out one of the biggest problems with blurbs:

I do recall, however, middle-school-me almost refusing to read The Hunger Games when I borrowed it because Stephenie Meyer had blurbed it and I was in a huge anti-Twilight phase.

Colin asked:

Is it the job of the publisher or the author to ask for blurbs? Are authors required to pursue them, or are they only asked to do this if they happen to have contact with HPNYTBSAs?

The editor and agent and author cooperate jointly on blurbs usually.

Angie Brooksby-Arcangioli asked:

My question is do publishers pay for blurbs? Especially HPNYTBSA?

No. No one pays for blurbs. If you see anyone offering to sell you blurbs, it's a flim flam artist not a real service.

And then Chirstina Seine just blew us all out of the water with the Pinterest board for Carkoon.

And until I was doing this week in review I had managed to forget that last Monday was pretty awful here:

1. There is no heat in my office
2. My computer broke
3. I left my cell phone at home

Julie asked how all that happened: the boiler in the building went on the fritz and my computer just died. It was very old so not a complete shocker, but annoying all the same.  This was the desktop in the office that has all the company info, not my laptop that has my day to day stuff on it.

I seriously thought of exiling myself to Carkoon, if only to get warm.

But then I had a better idea: a writing contest. The entries in contest are always great, and make me laugh, and THAT will warm us all up.

So, Tuesday was the Surprise Writing Contest in honor of Colin's birthday.

The prompt words were chosen for their relevance to Colin:

smith: obviously, since this is his name
exile: since his exile to Carkoon, this is where he lives
link: he's become the blog's resident link master, helping everyone do clickable links
seven: well, I thought there were seven kids, but now I hear there are only six?
music: Colin blogs about music (among other topics)

And there were some fabulous entries, We saw the finalist on Thursday, including Colin's own:

(2) Colin Smith 12:20pm

"What ya doing, Dr. Smith?"

I gritted my teeth and turned to see the Robinson boy.

"Fixing the communication link in my ship so I can call for help."

"Where's the Robot?"

I moved to hide the disembodied pincer that sat beside my leg. After seven years' exile with these fools, I was desperate enough to cannibalize that machine to try to fix my ship.

"I'm channeling his music circuits to… uh… enhance the frequency."

"I hope it works. The rescue ship's here and there's only room for the family."

The brat even smiled and waved as he ran off.

Which I loved because it was an homage to Lost In Space from 60's TV, but even if you didn't know that the story worked perfectly. I love that in stories, the multiple layers. Incredibly hard to do in 100 words!

And the winning entry was

4) Lobo 10:50pm

Indus’rial sabotage. Murder. Same ta me (truth b’told). ’Specially after that tex’ile mill job. But we’d already hit two competitors and my sevens game was callin’.

Creep kept squintin' at the building through oily Detroit smog. “He sleeps here with all them T-cars.”

“Model Teas, ya wordsmith.” I said. “An’ people say yer the smarty.”

Creep linked up the dynamite plunger, grinning so wide I thought his cheeks would bury his eyeballs. “Whatsa fella’s company again?”

I shrugged. “Stars with an F.”

“Should I start the music?”

“Nah. Leave ’im. Man sleepin’ with cars pro’ly don’t have much a future.”

I loved this because of the creative use of the prompt words (always something I look for) and that if you knew your history, this is really funny. If you don't know your history it's just a good story. Again, layers. And that's not even mentioning voice, which is hard to nail in a novel, let alone 100 words.

All the entries had a lot going for them, it was a tough choice.

I like what donnaeverhart pointed out in the comments on the contest:

I've been thinking about something for a while. Many times we woodland creatures worry about nitpicky things like someone stealing our stupendous writing idea if we shared too much of it.

This contest actually proves what we've been told many times in the writing community; "Only you can write your story."

Think about it. We're given five words, and not one of us ever comes close to having a similar story. We might re-use a word or two in the same way (wordsmith, for example) but beyond that, our stories are as diverse as our fingerprints and voices.

And donnaeverhart also wondered:

.." I've often wondered,(one or two of mine have landed here I think)what it is that makes them not a story for you? I've come to the conclusion it's because in some way, the writer hasn't resolved the MC's situation. I.e. it's left hanging in some way. Am I close?

Mostly it's that "not a story" is more like a scene, not a story with a start, middle, and end. It's hard to describe, but there's almost always what you'd call a punch line, or a twist of some sort that gives it that extra boost to story.

On Wednesday we talked about querying magazines versus querying books,

Janet Rundquist asked:

"There are a lot of places now to publish articles that don't require querying first at all. The danger there is if your writing isn't up to par, you can damage your career pretty easily."

I'm not quite sure what this means. ie: the publication will remember your first sub-par submission and it will prejudice them for future attempts? Or that they might actually publish it and others will see this sub-par quality and make judgments from there? Or...?

If you have a lot of bad writing up on the web, and you query me, I'm going to see it. This is particularly true of non-fiction. A non-fiction query has a concept and a plan. There are a lot of good concepts and plans out there, so the trick is figuring out if this querier can actually write. First stop: the google.  Locate all the pub credits. Read.

The google is merciless though: it coughs up the bad writing as well as the good.

Colin asked:

How is it different with a short story submission to a mag?

Very different. Those rejected stories don't get published, and if you get rejected, it's not likely editors remember your name. It's also expected that writers get better over time, so some very bad work is simply ascribed to "new writer" and that's that.

 It's the rush to publish that will kill you. There are a lot of places to put work out there that have NO editorial oversight. Editorial oversight is your friend when you are a writer. Especially when you think it isn't.

Bjmuntain had some good points on writing non-fiction article as well:

One thing to take away from querying non-fiction magazines: Don't wait until you've finished writing the article to query, unless you want to prove to yourself you can write that article. Non-fiction magazines buy ideas - very unlike fiction magazines - and they'll reject the idea, too. They don't want to see a full article until they commission it, based on your idea. Since you wouldn't sell the same article to two magazines (even similar magazines have different focuses and styles), you'll just be rewriting the article again.

Basically, the difference between fiction and non-fiction magazines is: Fiction magazines buy writing. Non-fiction magazines buy ideas, and they assume you can write the idea. This latter is why it's good to have 'clippings' - articles or other writing you can point to, to tell the magazine 'See? I can write goooood.' Of course, that's where the catch 22 comes in: magazines want you to have previous published pieces, but you can't get those unless a magazine will publish them.

If you feel your non-fiction writing on your chosen topic is professional enough, you could start a blog about it, to get pub credit and followers. I believe it's not difficult to get a blog on io9, and it may attract more readers. Or, if you're able to market your blog, you can do that, too.

And I'm really sure Barbara Poelle hasn't seen her new bio courtesy of brianrschawarz, but I plan to have it engraved on something silver for her:

a woman who was clearly the sole influence in Eve's decision to eat the apple in the garden of Eden in the first place...

And then the comments just fell off into the hilarity I love, which is a good thing because this was the day that I got my new computer and discovered I couldn't get my back ups reinstalled.

Fortunately on Thursday, I was able to get tech support on the phone and several hours later, voila!, success.  Not much work got done, but all in all, we're counting that as a good day.

On Friday, we turned to the topic of very small print runs of a book.

Carolynwith2Ns had a lovely analogy for this kind of thing, and then everyone else just fell off the topic and right into hilarity, starting with Amy Schaefer wishing us happy returns from the future and Colin talking to himself about the reality of Carkoon.

LynnRodz did ask a good question though:

Am I wrong to think "this is the day and age of forever" only applies to free blogs?

Yes. The New York Times is pretty much forever online too, which is ok if you're just publishing blather cause the NYT isn't going to print that, but there are sites without those standards that last a long time.

bjmuntain has an excellent point here:

Once you put something out on the internet - no matter where - you no longer have control over it. Despite security precautions and content protection, it's out of your hands. (You still have copyright, but you don't have control. Neither does the website it was posted on.)

On Saturday, a reader asked if I had ever missed a "big book."

Melissa had an interesting story along those lines:

I heard a Pulitzer-prize winning author speak at a class and tell the story of some good advice she once gave. An editor friend asked her thoughts about a horse book that was going up for auction. This author had a love of horses and dabbled with a few books in the genre.

"Do you think I should bid on it?" the editor asked.

"No, horse books never sell," the author advised.

With this great tip, the editor passed on the chance to bid for Seabiscuit. Amazingly, they're still friends.

This actually underscores my point: that editor was not the right editor for that book. How do I know? She asked for opinions on whether she should buy it. The right editor generally LUSTS for the manuscript, wants to buy it, and the only thing she wants to know is how much she can offer.

Dena Pawling asked

How much extra work are books/authors like that? Previously you mentioned/joked that Little, Brown had an entire branch office dedicated to James Patterson. I'm sure an agent can max out on the number of clients she represents. So if, for example, you represented five Lee Child's, or apparently just one James Patterson, would that be all you could handle? Their royalty statements are probably longer, and I imagine you have to field more calls regarding sales of rights [a nice bit of extra work, I'm sure]. But is a mega-selling book/author 10% more work than your “normal” clients, or 25%, or 100%? Inquiring minds [okay, maybe just mine] want to know.

If you have a mega-best selling author, yup, you staff up for it. Much depends on the kind of work being generated. Film deals, translation deals, permissions, rights. Some of that requires planning and executing. Some of it just requires detailed record keeping and follow up.  The king of kind of (yikes!!) work being added determines what kind of staffing up you do.

Craig has taken my answer to the question as a personal challenge: 

Nothing you have turned down has gone on to big things. I guess that I'm going to have to prove you wrong. I'm sorry, I still love you and have all of the respect in the world for you but that is just how it has to be.

Craig, the trick here is that you're going to have to query me for the book that DOES become a big success. It doesn't count if you queried me for an earlier novel and I passed then.

Mister Furkles asked: 

With over 100 queries every week, do you even remember the ones you turn down. I imagine you might remember manuscripts, especially if you read to the end. But do you remember rejected queries?

I don't remember the queries I turn down. BUT, I read pages from most of the novels that I think might be a good fit here, so I read a lot of stuff I don't take on.

And just in case you need something to scare you more than querying, DLM gave us this:

Last night, I must've had you on my mind too, because - after running across something about "body horror" when researching agents, I ended up having a dream about having scary cysts removed from my body that turned out to be lima beans.

I honestly didn't realize just how much a part of my mental landscape this community is ...

A few housekeeping notes for y'all.

Next week is Holy Week, and I will NOT be posting original content to the blog Thursday-Sunday. I will be in church, praying for all the people of the world. Yup, we do that and it's actually very interesting to see the order folks get mentioned.  We pray for everyone including atheists this week!

Thursday is The Easter Triduum and the mass of the Lords' Supper.

Friday is the Liturgy of the Lord's Passion at 3pm, followed by Tenebrae at 6pm.

This is the only day of the year that I wish I lived in a less secular world.  When exiting the church after the light has gone out of the world, it's jarring to see people just conducing their daily business as normal, laughing, eating ice cream, reading novels!  Fortunately, we DO live in a country where I can go to the church of my choice on a Friday, even if it's not the faith of the majority.

On Saturday, the Great Vigil of Easter starts at 8pm, and of course Sunday is Easter.

No matter what your religious leaning, or non-leaning, we can all celebrate the arrival of spring, and rebirth. I hope it is a lovely time for you, and the start of a great new season.