Balls and Walnuts
more than you ever wanted to know
Category Archives: Writer’s Life
Work, work
It’s the good work, the kind of stuff I don’t mind doing.
Thus far, I have:
*identified eight agents who want new clients, represent romance, and represent science fiction. I found them using Agent Query, an online searchable agent database,
*written my query letter,
*reviewed and spiffed my first three chapters, and
*made a dent on my synopsis — the first three paragraphs, anyway, using this page as a model.
The synopsis is the bitchiest part. I’m sure I echoed thousands of writers before me when, upon first learning about synopses, I said, “I have to do WHAT?” And it tweaks me that even if I write a great one-page synopsis, some agents will want to see more detailed three- or five-page synopses. It makes me want to scream, to tell you the truth.
Here’s another page on synopsis writing, one which boils down a lot of the advice I’ve read elsewhere.
And here’s a huge clearinghouse of links on synopsis-writing.
Tempted as I am to send off queries to those folks who ONLY want a query letter, I’m going to hold off until I have the synopsis written. By Murphy’s Law, if someone’s interested in my work, what are they going to want next? The synopsis, of course.
And now, for microsoar and protected static:
Four ferrets and a German Shepherd pup
Yeah, I didn’t waste too much time watching ferret vids . . .
D.
Parting ways
Googling around this morning, trying to find out who is this-or-that author’s agent, I discovered something that might be month-old news to many of you, but it was new-news to me.
At AAR After Hours, Sandy Coleman reports that Jennifer Crusie and her agent, Meg Ruley, are no longer a pair:
Over at argh ink, Jennifer Crusie just broke the news that she was “fired” (in her words) by her long time agent, Meg Ruley. As Ms. Crusie puts it, she and Ms. Ruley wanted her career to go in “different directions”.
This is a powerful statement by an agent. Make that a very powerful statement. And I really hope that Ms. Crusie takes the time to ponder just what it means when a woman who has stood by you for years and supported your work most ably chooses to part ways.
Ms. Crusie added to the comment thread, and she shows herself to be a class act. I know we’ve all read examples of authors behaving badly — bad-mouthing their publishers or agents — but this isn’t one of those stories. Here’s Ms. Crusie back at her place:
Friday, I went for drinks with my agent, Meg, and when I saw her sitting at the table behind a pillar, I knew something was wrong. She looked so strained, and Meg never does, she’s always who-loves-ya-baby upbeat. I sat down and said, out of the blue, before I even knew what was happening, “You’re firing me, aren’t you?†And we talked about what we both knew, that I wanted my career to go in a different direction than she did, and she said, “I think you should find a new agent.†And I thought, This can’t be happening, but I said, “Any suggestions?†not “Wait, we can work this out.†And we talked and hugged each other because she’s truly one of my best friends, and then I went back to the Village and thought, Everything’s new again. That moment of sheer panic when everything changed . . . liberating.
Wow. It would be like me saying, “I’M SICK OF BOOGERS AND WAX, DO YOU HEAR? I’ve always wanted to be lumberjack!”
Or a romance writer. Same difference.
Good luck, Jenny.
D.
PS: Live-blogging tonight . . . same time, same channel, if all goes well.
Correction: we’re going out to eat! Yeah, it doesn’t happen all that often, but tonight I get lucky. (Meaning, I don’t have to cook.) (No telling about the secondary meaning.) So, I may be around here sometime after 8, but not sooner.
Quick note to my betas
Just emailed you the latest version of Technical Virgins. If you were expecting to get this and haven’t, I may not have your most recent email address. Leave me a note in the comments, or email me at
azureus
at
harborside (dot)
com
D.
Done! (again)
With a near record-breaking 4625 4993* word day, I’ve finished my romance. Final word count, 106.5K.
The working title has been Sloppy Firsts, but that’s been taken — recently, too. It looks like it was a popular book.
As a backup, I like Technical Virgins. That title was last used in 1998, and as best I can tell, the book wasn’t nearly as popular as Sloppy Firsts.
Eh. I suck at titles.
Note to my betas: I’ll be rereading the last 10K pages or so this next weekend, and once I’m happy with the new ending, I’ll send out the new version. No one is under any obligation to read this, of course, but I know a few of you have expressed an interest.
If you think you’re a beta and you don’t have something in your hot little hands by next Sunday, let me know.
*wipes sweat from brow*
I’m done!
D.
*Couldn’t resist the urge to fiddle. (Really, though, I remembered one more loose end which needed tending.)
GallimauFriday
Check out The Hermit’s new political vid. Davis Fleetwood hooks into an emotion I tried to explain here, but y’all thought I was talking about music or something. And I was thinking about it again this morning on the drive to work. On NPR, they were yapping about the housing crash, about how devastating an experience it is to have your house on the market right now. “I’m so exhausted,” the woman said. “I never know when the real estate agent is going to show up, so every morning, I have to Windex the windows before I go to work.”
I thought about Davis’s video, and everything snapped into perspective.
Join me below the fold for
FROGS!
ZAFTIG WOMEN!
A FRIDAY SNIPPET!
and more, because there’s always me, too.
SBD: Help me end this thing.
I’m close. So very, very close.
At the risk of abusing Beth’s Smart Bitches Day tradition, I’m going to use this morning’s post to solicit help in ending my romance. Specifically, I need information. I figure the collective experience of my romance-reading readers beats the crap out of my meager investigations any day of the week.
We want . . . information.
Is it, or is it not de rigeur in a romance novel for the hero to overcome challenges and prove himself in the denouement? Well, whether it is or not, I’d like you to give me examples of how this was done in your favorite romance novels. Or in your most hated romance novels, for that matter — it’s all grist for the mill.
Trust me, I have something in mind for all of this information, and it’s not what you think. My betas will, I hope, be pleasantly surprised.
D.
What killed me?
No matter how many times I look at Samhain’s list for the final round, my entry doesn’t appear. Oh, well. I made it one round more than I thought I would.
Assuming the editor(s) in my corner didn’t have second thoughts about a doctor who lusts after his patient, I can only assume something in my last line killed me. Here’s the opening, including that deadly last line:
This looks like a good one
When I bought The 2007 Guide to Literary Agents on Barnes and Noble’s website the other day, the site suggested I look at Noah Lukeman’s The First Five Pages, A Writer’s Guide to Staying Out of the Rejection Pile. Sounded worthwhile, so I bought it, figuring if it could teach me even one new thing, it would be worth the purchase price.
The author is a literary agent and former editor. His goal is to let you, the writer, know what criteria an editor or agent uses to toss manuscripts into the round file.
While evaluating more than ten thousand manuscripts in the last few years, I was able to set forth definite criteria, an agenda for rejecting manuscripts. This is the core of The First Five Pages: my criteria revealed to you.
Here’s the first part of the table of contents, with my words of explanation in brackets. Part I is called “Preliminary Problems”:
Presentation [manuscript format]
Adjectives and Adverbs
Sound [rhythm]
Comparison [use and misuse of imagery]
Style
Part II is “Dialogue,” Part III, “The Bigger Picture” (show vs. tell, characterization, pacing, etc.) I suspect I’ll have much more to say about The First Five Pages as I work through it, but here’s my early opinion: this book looks like a keeper. I’ll keep you posted.
And since I got slammed at work today and I’m having trouble keeping my eyes open, this is all I have for you tonight. Sorry!
In fact, this day reached such an acme of suckitude, I was tempted to begin a new Thirteen: Thirteen Unglamorous Things about my Profession.
1. “I hope you don’t catch what I got,” she said after coughing in my face.
2. “Cover your mouth when you cough,” the child’s mother said after her old-enough-to-know-better child fired off his fifth snot rocket.
3. “I didn’t mean to do that,” my nosebleeder said, gazing with wonder at the pointillistic spray of blood across my eyeglasses and facemask.
4. “GhhhRRRAAARGgggllll omigod RAARGH RAAAAAAAARGH,” my nosebleeder said as we both discovered what had happened to all that blood she’d been swallowing over the past four hours.
Ugh. I don’t think I could manage thirteen of these without making myself sick.
D.
Friday Snippet the First
Holly Lisle’s meme, by way of Tamara Siler Jones (who has posted another scene, woot!)
I’ve posted a bit of Nest before, but you needn’t read that portion. What follows is the first scene of Chapter Two, and all you need to know can be conveyed by the movie’s tagline (for when this trilogy gets published and becomes a blockbuster motion picture):
Animal Farm — in Space!
Meet the Grith Lyssomes.
(more…)
SBD: Kissing impaired
First the news: I’ve made it to Round Three in the Samhain Contest. My entry is now #4 in the comment thread. This is the make-or-break line, in my opinion. If I don’t alienate my supporter(s) with this one, I might just make it to the finish line.
***
“Kiss Me Goodnight,” from marco_n65
Last Thursday, Thorne commented that she would like me to write about:
Your first kiss. (The kiss by which all others have been judged; and found wanting)
I’ve been thinking about this a lot. Over the weekend, I started re-editing my romance, and when I came to the first kiss, I thought Meh. I play the first and second kisses for laughs, and none of them ever rise to rock-my-world quality. I also recall many of my betas griping about my lack of time and attention to kissing. All seemed to agree that my writing is trapped in Freud’s Genital Stage.
It has been a fascinating exercise, parsing my opening line by line, wondering what might be a poison pill. With the second sentence, I worried the editors might gag over a sentence fragment. No! (And among the various entries, they let a few other fragments pass, too.) I figured the third line would be certain suicide, given not only the high squick factor but also the overall weirdness of the sentence. Flan? Coffee? WTF?
When line 3 passed muster, I figured I was home free, and I was so excited to get to sentence 5 (God himself would weep to see such a beautiful vulva — which cracks me up, every time I read it) that I didn’t apply full scrutiny to sentence 4.
I see two potential problems, but perhaps you folks can find others. First, there’s a bothersome echo centered on the word “seen” (“he had ever seen,” “he had never seen”). Second, the sentence is somewhat agrammatical. Might a dash have worked better than a comma after “coffee”?
And now I see a third problem, one which was present in sentence 3 but became more obvious in sentence 4: the distance changes between the first and second paragraphs. Para 1 is remote, but with para 2, we’re fully inside Brad’s fevered brain.
Yeah, yeah — I know a guy can go nuts over-analyzing such things. But if you can trust Noah Lukeman’s book, editors look for reasons to reject long before they look for reasons to accept. If I can edit out those surefire rejection problems, so much the better for the fate of my book.
Of course, if I never write the ending, I’ll never get to submit it.
Last things first.
D.