Balls and Walnuts
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Category Archives: Writer’s Life
Support your local writer
Oy, the Writer’s Strike. Will those evil corporate minions ever learn that they are no match for organized creative talent?
For those of you who are suffering JSSCWS (Jon Stewart & Stephen Colbert Withdrawal Syndrome, which is only a little less damaging than Priapic Sleep Arousal Syndrome), The Daily Show’s writers have put together an entertaining YouTube video, showcased over at DailyKos. Enjoy.
D.
SBD: Notice me! *updated*
For Smart Bitches Day, if Kate gets to rant about sloppy publishers and Lyvvie gets to crit I, Lucifer, I say it’s fair game for me to kvetch about my damned romance.
Why won’t anyone notice me? I sent out seven query packages and got seven rejections. Not one request for more material, not one personalized note — form letters, all of them. Then I sent off four queries electronically, to agents who prefer to deal with writers that way, and I haven’t heard back from anyone yet.
Admittedly, eleven queries is bupkes in this biz. Y’all send out dozens, I imagine, but between working a day job, cooking great meals for my family, and sitting on my ass reading people’s blogs, who has time to prepare dozens of queries? Because they all ask for something different. It’s almost a point of honor with these agents.
Rampant in the self-help-for-wannabe-authors literature is the notion that quality sells. If you write well enough, you WILL be noticed, you WILL be published. Hah! If it were that easy, I would have received at least one personalized comment — “Not right for us, but I like your style. Keep trying.” Is that so much to ask? As much as I might bitch about the short story market (and I could bitch a lot), I received several notes of encouragement. It wasn’t much, but it was enough.
This is not an ego issue. Surgical internship toughens the ego into this leathery thing you wouldn’t let your dog chew — you try working 80 hours a week on a steady diet of “Doogie” this and “Doogie” that, “Touch that one more time and I’ll rip off your head and shit down your neck,” or “What were you thinking? We don’t pay you to think.” I survived internship at the biggest county hospital in the nation. I don’t need an agent’s (editor’s, publisher’s) recognition to make me whole.
It’s more a problem-solving issue with me. I’ve set myself a task and I’m unhappy with the murky, chance-riddled path to success. Nothing left to do but send out more queries, right? Because, short of becoming a stalker, there’s no other way to be noticed, is there?
*checking computer clock* Well, that successfully spent another thirty minutes of free time. The laundry’s done, the kitchen’s clean, my wife and son are well fed. Nothing left to do but (don’tclickonDailyKos don’tclickonDailyKos don’tclickonDailyKos) get to work on those queries.
Oh. Don’t forget Kate’s contest and my contest.
D.
Update
Now I’m looking at the publishing houses. First up, Avalon Books.
Our books are wholesome adult fiction, suitable for family reading. There is no graphic or premarital sex or sexual tension in any of our novels; kisses and embraces are as far as our characters go.
Hmm. I take it rimming is a deal-breaker?
Kate has a contest
I expended my evening’s creativity on those 400 words, so if you want something to read, you know where to find it. And you’ll see lots of our friends among the entries — Sam, Dean, microsoar, and a few folks I haven’t met.
Live blogging tonight, but I’m not sure when. Depends on the leg o’ lamb. And oy, I’m tired; I think I’ve been cooking and cleaning continuously since noon. Aside from the lamb, I made some kind of eggplant dip, dough for a focaccia, tiramisu, and a pumpkin sweet potato pie. Oh, and I made breakfast for the fam, too.
Check in around 8 PM PST . . . hopefully I’ll be here.
D.
NaBloPoMo: how tough can this be?
I mean, really. Post once a day for the month of November? Since I started this blog, I don’t think I’ve missed more than two or three days.
I like this kind of challenge. Far more rational than NaNoWriMo.
Butt Cleavage Heaven
Untitled, originally uploaded by Random Picss.
Oh. My. God.
There’s a group on Flickr called Random Butt Crack. I’m ecstatic, delirious, like a kid in a butt crack store. True, I have to wade through some hairy-guy butt crack (SOMEONE needs to show some discrimination on this group) but it’s worth it.
Amateur butt crack — 1,120 of ’em. ‘Kay bye gotta go.
***
Yeah, you knew I wouldn’t do that to you, not even for prime butt crack. Tonight, I think I’ll pimp Bam’s contest, even though I don’t have an entry and Bam never visits me anymore. Lovely idea:
I am sick of reading about dudes busting down doors, waving around semi-automatics, bragging about their three-thousand-dollar Ralph Lauren Black Label jackets— while the females in the story simpered and shook like a wet chihuahua and waited for the loud-mouth braggart hero to save her. The theme of this month’s contest? Two words: Kickass. Heroine. You want FIFTY AMAZON BUX!! (USD)? Here’s what you gotta do. In 400 words or less, write me a short little scene (or story) featuring a harsh, uncompromising, kickass female (think Gina Torres in Firefly or Angelina Jolie in Mr and Mrs. Smith) saving the precious, taut hiney of your male love interest.
But here’s the sad part. When I read this, I remembered a scene in my SF trilogy in which Bare Rump, a ten-foot-long sentient tarantula, defends her love interest (a sentient male fly half her size) from marauding giant wasps. And I thought, wouldn’t this be great for Bam’s contest? I’ll bet no one else will write about a kickass female tarantula defending her beau, a giant housefly!
I haven’t looked at this manuscript since May ’06; since then, I’ve written a romance, I’m a year older, and not much else has changed. Nothing except for my writing, apparently, because now I have the overwhelming urge to slash the page with indelible red ink (which would royally piss off the wife, since this is a relatively new flat screen monitor). Is this what happens when you leave a manuscript and come back to it after a year? Frightening. I’m wondering if I could cut the trilogy down to a normal-sized novel, in fact.
I think I’ve mentioned before how my first abortive novel (tag line: Casablanca — in space!) died for lack of discipline on my part. The plot bunnies would not stop multiplying. My story threads became knotted in dreadlocks. My characters kept asking one another, “Now, who the hell are you?” And now I’m wondering if my trilogy (tag line: Animal Farm — in space!) suffers from the same problem, albeit to a lesser degree. I did indeed pull all the threads together, and I killed off many bunnies in the third book, but the damnable thing lacks discipline. What — eight, nine POV characters? At least.
I’m beginning to understand why people write four or five or six novels before they manage to write their first publishable novel.
Ah, well, I suppose I should look at that manuscript when I’m daisy-fresh, not when I’m burnt to a crisp at the end of a radioactive week.
D.
Two down, five to go, and more
I received my first two nays from agents today. Two down, five to go.
***
Finally got around to figuring out who sings that wonderfully haunting tune in V for Vendetta . . . the song playing on V’s juke box when Evie comes in out of the rain.
The artist is Cat Power. The song is “I Found a Reason,” and oh, what a voice. I bought two CDs online, and I promise I’ll review them here.
***
Shaina, you come around to some old guy’s blog to tempt him with your boobs, and that makes the old guy the perv?
Fine. I’m a perv. And you got a great rack.
D.
The beat-yourself-up meme
Dan tagged me. Here’s the idea: I’m supposed to identify my most frequent writing mistake, then tag five other bloggers to do the same.
Trouble is, I don’t make mistakes. But I do have a tic: I love exotic punctuation. Colons, dashes, ellipses, parentheses are like an irresistible plate of hors d’ouevres. Why stop at one? I’d rather fill up on them!
I think I have this tic because I’m a control freak, and I love controlling rhythm. I want the reader to hear the same linguistic tune that’s rolling through my brain, and I don’t trust mere commas and periods to do that for me. Why is this a bad tic? Because it draws attention to the writing. As I’ve said in the past, I would prefer the writing to drop away and leave the reader with nothing but story. Anything that calls attention to the writing (or, God forbid, the writer) breaks the meditation. For example, yesterday I looked at a column written by Christopher Hitchens, in which he not only used a two-bit word (etiolated) but linked it to its Dictionary.com definition. “Blanched” or “anemic” would have worked just as well, but Hitchens went with etiolated.
Now I get to tag five blogger-writers. I’ll link y’all later, when I have access to a computer that’s not Flintstone-aged. (There we go!)
Blog about it if you like, or answer in the comments. (Oh, and if you’d like to play and I haven’t tagged you, be my guest.)
With any luck, I’ll have something truly disturbing for you, either later today or sometime tomorrow.
D.
Tangent on Sabbatical
Don’t forget the CONTEST!
If you’re not (A) a Tangent Online reviewer, (B) a friend of a Tangent Online reviewer, or (C) a friend of one of the main combatants, then you probably don’t know about the amazing shitstorm of the past 36 hours. You certainly won’t learn anything by checking out the Tangent site, nor has former editor Eugie Foster spilled on her blog. And you won’t get much enlightenment from me, either.
In Eugie’s words, she was “summarily dismissed.” I gather there were irreconcilable differences at the top echelon. Anyway, in the last twenty-four hours . . . wow. LOTS of people using their “REPLY ALL” button when they ought to have used their “REPLY” button, and as a consequence, we’ve all been witnesses to and participants in this mass desertion from Tangent. Turns out lots of other people feel the same way I do — wait. No. There’s a hell of a lot of emotion out there. I think I’m one of the few Vulcans.
***
I had a 2.5 hour general medical staff meeting this evening. Don’t ask. But the dream I had last night strikes me as a premonition.
It’s my mom’s Mustang, only it looks a hell of a lot better than my mom’s Mustang ever looked. And it’s mine now. But for some damned reason, I decide to drive it out of the parking lot while sitting in the passenger seat. Not surprisingly, I can’t control the car. Can’t steer worth beans, and I’m having a hard time getting my foot to hit the brake rather than the accelerator. I need to do a three-point turn to get out of the parking lot, and at each point, I’m bashing one thing or another — industrial garbage can here, some badass’s fancy truck there. I’m in big trouble now.
And my Mustang doesn’t look so hot anymore.
No, no major disasters at the meeting, but I feel like someone’s cleaning my ears with ice picks.
D.
P.S. Know what’s depressing? If it weren’t for this boob photo, the fact that I linked to these nude photos of Heather Graham, or my posting of J. Lo’s big ass, I’d be getting something like twenty hits a day.
Don’t believe me? Post those three photos to your blog (or just link the Heather Graham nude photos, like I did) and watch your hits shoot through the roof. It’ll take some time, but it will surely happen.
PPS: This cheered me up: Itzhak Perlman Plays Klezmer.
The maestro joins four klezmer groups: Brave Old World, The Klezmatics, Andy Statman and the Klezmer Conservatory Band for a joyous get-together with unforgettable Klezmer melodies. As he says of the experience, “I caught the bug!”
. . . maybe now I can get to sleep.
Is vibrador Spanish for vibrator?
I’m working through some edits Lyvvie suggested, and that question came up.
Oh, here, too.
Back to my editing. And you folks, back to your baking. You won’t win my contest by lounging about all day.
D.
Oh, and this was just too funny. No vibrators, only a bad video game, lots of X-Files actors, and one hilarious writer.
Tuesday Morning Fanfare
Kris Starr has a contest. She’s offering all kinds of wonderful prizes, including Aussie man-candy, this thing that looks like a Dildo Family-Pak, some sort of S&M paddle, and that numbing cream guys use so that they can last to ease your sore back. At least, that’s what it looks like. I didn’t read the fine print.
***
Monica re-posts an article on twenty ways to break writer’s block. I suppose I could link to the original article, but I like looking at Monica’s photo too much 🙂
***
I sent off seven query packages in the last two days. Wish me luck.
I’ll have more for y’all later; I need to eat my lunch.
D.