Wednesday, December 07, 2005

StoryPilot's Science Fiction & Fantasy Market Search Engine

Found a great magazine search site. You can do a specific search and then scroll down to see a list of magazines. This site also allows you to save your search list in a file. You don't need to pay a dime to join. Just create a user name and password. I don't know how often the magazines are updated.

Tuesday, December 06, 2005

Miss Snark, the literary agent

This blog is a must read for writers. It is written by an anonymous agent and offers advice on marketing, synopsis writing, and answers writers questions on agents, as well as other writing related issues. The questions are posted by writers seeking advice and answered by Miss Snark. The site is informative and amusing.

How is that possible? You ask. There's only one way to find out.

Go to the damn site and see for yourself.

Friday, November 25, 2005

village voice > vls > North by Northeaster by Jenny Davidson

The Sherlock Holmes quote: "When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth," encapsulates Stephen King's latest novella, "North by Northeasater."

Read entire article by clicking on the title link.

Wednesday, November 23, 2005

'Potter' series casts a spell over entire genre - Yahoo! News

Science fiction and fantasy writers be heartened by this article, appearing in USA Today. It appears that sales of science fiction and fantasy have jumped 8.5% in the past five years.

Click on the link and find out why.

Thursday, November 17, 2005

village voice > vls > Quit Lit by Izzy Grinspan

With the recent publication of Lauren Weisberger's second novel, Everyone Worth Knowing, job-horror fiction has officially come into its own—but only for women.

-------------
I can relate to job horror. Work sucks the life from you like a vampire.

ABC News: How to Write a Novel in 30 Days

Nov. 17, 2005 — Are you convinced you have a novel in you but just don't want to spend all that time and mental effort to actually work on it?

If that's the case, you could join 60,000 other intrepid, wanna-be novelists competing in National Novel Writers Month (NaNoWriMo for short) — a sprint to finish a 50,000-word novel from scratch during the month of November.

Wednesday, October 26, 2005

A nation of sidewalk publishers | csmonitor.com

"For less than $500, anyone can become a published author. But how many self-published books make it to the mainstream?"

For the answer to this question and others, click on the above link header. If you absolutely cannot wait to find out the answer to the above question . . .

Drum roll!

"Fewer than 50 titles are picked up by traditional publishers each year - that's about 0.5 percent."

By the way, that really sucks. Might be better to write a really good book then look for an agent. Postage is a hell of a lot cheaper than publishing and promoting your book.

Sunday, October 23, 2005

STEAL THIS BOOK -- OR AT LEAST DOWNLOAD IT FREE.

Interesting advice from author Warren Adler, brainchild of "War of the Roses."

For someone who has been in the publishing industry for years, Mr. Adler provides contemporary solutions, i.e., e-book publishing, etc. for getting ones book in print, if the conventional route doesn't pan out.

Mr. Adler also offers book marketing solutions, as well as practical approaches in the art of writing.

Wednesday, October 19, 2005

"Elements of Style." The Opera?

Well, actually, before it was scored for opera, it was first illustrated. Some people just can't enjoy their commas and hyphens without an attractive backsplash. I, for one, can't fathom viewing an exclamation point without a smattering of red. Though the excitement of viewing this much beloved volume in color will likely keep me awake at night, I think I'll wait for the release of the opera. I can't think of a better way to enjoy my drive to work than to listen to an aria on the apostrophe.

What's next in the publishing world? Shakespeare does Sicily?

Sunday, October 16, 2005

Time Magazine Picks 100 Best Books from 1923 to Present

Times Critics Lev Grossman and Richard Lacayo picked what they saw to be the 100 Best books since 1923, the year that TIME Magazine began.

Thursday, October 13, 2005

Punching Up Your Prose

Great article on sentence structure.

For those who have a desire to work on grammar, this article is really a good way to learn the basics.

Grammar has been an elusive creature for me. Though, I have taken several grammar and punctuation courses over the years. I found that the best way to learn is to have your work edited.

At this point in my life, I'm beginning to understand the comma (no coma) dilemma. In the past, I've sprinkled commas thoughtout my writing as if I were adding salt to an already tasteful stew. What I've neglected to realize. Commas, and therefore, any form of punctuation should be regarded as traffic signs, to help the reader master the flow of a sentence. We all know that placing a misplaced comma can change the flow, as well as the meaning of a sentence.

I would love to have a better grasp of the mechanics of writing. I hope that it happens sooner rather than later. I hope I don't have to wait years to comprehend sentence structure. I can forsee this scenario: At the ripe old age of 95, I awaken in the middle of a chair nap, and remark to the nurse. "So that's what a a direct object is."

The nurse nods and says, "That's why I went into nursing."

Monday, October 10, 2005

New Fantasy Magazine Launches

Please note this excerpt from Writers Market Market Watch.

Fantasy Magazine, a new quarterly magazine brimming with stories, book reviews, and interviews, launching Nov. 2005. Each issue is at least 80 pages in length, full-size, with gorgeous cover art.


Source: publishersnewswire.com

Also, for anyone located near Madison, Wisconsin, the World Fantasy Convention, takes place Nov. 4 - 6 in Madison, Wisconsin.

Fantasy Magazine will appear quarterly, with a cover price of $5.95.

Literary Agent's Journal

Another great site I've stumbled across--Literary Agent's Live Journal. The Agent's entries touch upon client book signings, running behind in his reading of manuscripts, his days on the road, etc. It offers an interesting behind-the-scenes perspective.

Sunday, October 09, 2005

Writing Fiction

I recently found an excellent site that discusses "How to" get published and find an agent. The site also has useful links.

Thursday, September 29, 2005

2006 US Agents Listing @ Writers Services Website

Writers Services has just updated their US Agents Listing. Please visit their website and check out the valuable resourse information posted at their site.

The title is the link to their website.

Wednesday, September 28, 2005

Principles of a story by Raymond Carver

From Chekhov to James Joyce, the short story defined modern fiction. The form later came to be defined by America. Writing in 1981, one of the great US writers explains why he came to prefer the story to the novel Raymond Carver.

This essay first appeared in the "New York Times Book Review" in 1981 as "A Storyteller's Notebook." Entitled "On Writing," it is included in "Fires: Essays, Poems, Stories" (Harvill Press) by Raymond Carver. © 1968 to 1988 by Raymond Carver, 1989 to present by Tess Gallagher.
-----

Back in the mid-1960s, I found I was having trouble concentrating my attention on long narrative fiction. For a time I experienced difficulty in trying to read it as well as in attempting to write it. My attention span had gone out on me; I no longer had the patience to try to write novels. It's an involved story, too tedious to talk about here. But I know it has much to do now with why I write poems and short stories. Get in, get out. Don't linger. Go on. It could be that I lost any great ambitions at about the same time, in my late twenties. If I did, I think it was good it happened. Ambition and a little luck are good things for a writer to have going for him. Too much ambition and bad luck, or no luck at all, can be killing. There has to be talent.

Some writers have a bunch of talent; I don't know any writers who are without it. But a unique and exact way of looking at things, and finding the right context for expressing that way of looking, that's something else. The World According to Garp is, of course, the marvellous world according to John Irving. There is another world according to Flannery O'Connor, and others according to William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway. There are worlds according to Cheever, Updike, Singer, Stanley Elkin, Ann Beattie, Cynthia Ozick, Donald Barthelme, Mary Robison, William Kittredge, Barry Hannah, Ursula K Le Guin. Every great or even every very good writer makes the world over according to his own specifications.

It's akin to style, what I'm talking about, but it isn't style alone. It is the writer's particular and unmistakable signature on everything he writes. It is his world and no other. This is one of the things that distinguishes one writer from another. Not talent. There's plenty of that around. But a writer who has some special way of looking at things and who gives artistic expression to that way of looking: that writer may be around for a time.

Isak Dinesen said that she wrote a little every day, without hope and without despair. Someday I'll put that on a three-by-five card and tape it to the wall beside my desk. I have some three-by-five cards on the wall now. "Fundamental accuracy of statement is the one sole morality of writing." Ezra Pound. It is not everything by any means, but if a writer has "fundamental accuracy of statement" going for him, he's at least on the right track.

I have a three-by-five up there with this fragment of a sentence from a story by Chekhov: "…and suddenly everything became clear to him." I find these words filled with wonder and possibility. I love their simple clarity, and the hint of revelation that's implied. There is mystery, too. What has been unclear before? Why is it just now becoming clear? What's happened? Most of all—what now? There are consequences as a result of such sudden awakenings. I feel a sharp sense of relief—and anticipation.

I overheard the writer Geoffrey Wolff say "No cheap tricks" to a group of writing students. That should go on a three-by-five card. I'd amend it a little to "No tricks." Period. I hate tricks. At the first sign of a trick or a gimmick in a piece of fiction, a cheap trick or even an elaborate trick, I tend to look for cover. Tricks are ultimately boring, and I get bored easily, which may go along with my not having much of an attention span. But extremely clever chichi writing, or just plain tomfoolery writing, puts me to sleep. Writers don't need tricks or gimmicks or even necessarily need to be the smartest fellows on the block. At the risk of appearing foolish, a writer sometimes needs to be able to just stand and gape at this or that thing—a sunset or an old shoe—in absolute and simple amazement.

Some months back, in the New York Times Book Review, John Barth said that ten years ago most of the students in his fiction writing seminar were interested in "formal innovation," and this no longer seems to be the case. He's a little worried that writers are going to start writing mom and pop novels in the 1980s. He worries that experimentation may be on the way out, along with liberalism. I get a little nervous if I find myself within earshot of sombre discussions about "formal innovation" in fiction writing. Too often "experimentation" is a licence to be careless, silly or imitative in the writing. Even worse, a licence to try to brutalise or alienate the reader. Too often such writing gives us no news of the world, or else describes a desert landscape and that's all—a few dunes and lizards here and there, but no people; a place uninhabited by anything recognisably human, a place of interest only to a few scientific specialists.

It should be noted that real experiment in fiction is original, hard-earned and cause for rejoicing. But someone else's way of looking at things—Barthelme's, for instance—should not be chased after by other writers. It won't work. There is only one Barthelme, and for another writer to try to appropriate Barthelme's peculiar sensibility or mise en scène under the rubric of innovation is for that writer to mess around with chaos and disaster and, worse, self-deception. The real experimenters have to "make it new," as Pound urged, and in the process have to find things out for themselves. But if writers haven't taken leave of their senses, they also want to stay in touch with us, they want to carry news from their world to ours.

It's possible, in a poem or a short story, to write about commonplace things and objects using commonplace but precise language, and to endow those things—a chair, a window curtain, a fork, a stone, a woman's earring—with immense, even startling power. It is possible to write a line of seemingly innocuous dialogue and have it send a chill along the reader's spine—the source of artistic delight, as Nabokov would have it. That's the kind of writing that most interests me. I hate sloppy or haphazard writing whether it flies under the banner of experimentation or else is just clumsily rendered realism. In Isaac Babel's wonderful short story, "Guy de Maupassant," the narrator has this to say about the writing of fiction: "No iron can pierce the heart with such force as a period put just at the right place." This too ought to go on a three-by-five.

Evan Connell said once that he knew he was finished with a short story when he found himself going through it and taking out commas and then going through the story again and putting commas back in the same places. I like that way of working on something. I respect that kind of care for what is being done. That's all we have, finally, the words, and they had better be the right ones, with the punctuation in the right places so that they can best say what they are meant to say. If the words are heavy with the writer's own unbridled emotions, or if they are imprecise and inaccurate for some other reason—if the words are in any way blurred—the reader's eyes will slide right over them and nothing will be achieved. The reader's own artistic sense will simply not be engaged. Henry James called this sort of hapless writing "weak specification."

I have friends who've told me they had to hurry a book because they needed the money, their editor or their wife was leaning on them or leaving them—something, some apology for the writing not being very good. "It would have been better if I'd taken the time." I was dumbfounded when I heard a novelist friend say this. I still am, if I think about it, which I don't. It's none of my business. But if the writing can't be made as good as it is within us to make it, then why do it? In the end, the satisfaction of having done our best, and the proof of that labour, is the one thing we can take into the grave. I wanted to say to my friend, for heaven's sake go do something else. There have to be easier and maybe more honest ways to try and earn a living. Or else just do it to the best of your abilities, your talents, and then don't justify or make excuses. Don't complain, don't explain.

In an essay called, simply enough, "Writing Short Stories," Flannery O'Connor talks about writing as an act of discovery. O'Connor says she most often did not know where she was going when she sat down to work on a short story. She says she doubts that many writers know where they are going when they begin something. She uses "Good Country People" as an example of how she put together a short story whose ending she could not even guess at until she was nearly there:

When I started writing that story, I didn't know there was going to be a PhD with a wooden leg in it. I merely found myself one morning writing a description of two women I knew something about, and before I realised it, I had equipped one of them with a daughter with a wooden leg. I brought in the Bible salesman, but I had no idea what I was going to do with him. I didn't know he was going to steal that wooden leg until ten or twelve lines before he did it, but when I found out that this was what was going to happen, I realised it was inevitable.

When I read this some years ago, it came as a shock that she, or anyone for that matter, wrote stories in this fashion. I thought this was my uncomfortable secret, and I was a little uneasy with it. For sure I thought this way of working on a short story somehow revealed my own shortcomings. I remember being tremendously heartened by reading what she had to say on the subject.

I once sat down to write what turned out to be a pretty good story, though only the first sentence of the story had offered itself to me when I began it. For several days I'd been going around with this sentence in my head: "He was running the vacuum cleaner when the telephone rang." I knew a story was there and that it wanted telling. I felt it in my bones, that a story belonged with that beginning, if I could just have the time to write it. I found the time, an entire day—12, 15 hours even—if I wanted to make use of it. I did, and I sat down in the morning and wrote the first sentence, and other sentences promptly began to attach themselves. I made the story just as I'd make a poem; one line and then the next, and the next. Pretty soon I could see a story—and I knew it was my story, the one I'd been wanting to write.

I like it when there is some feeling of threat or sense of menace in short stories. I think a little menace is fine to have in a story. For one thing, it's good for the circulation. There has to be tension, a sense that something is imminent, that certain things are in relentless motion, or else, most often, there simply won't be a story. What creates tension in a piece of fiction is partly the way the concrete words are linked together to make up the visible action of the story. But it's also the things that are left out, that are implied, the landscape just under the smooth (but sometimes broken and unsettled) surface of things.

VS Pritchett's definition of a short story is "something glimpsed from the corner of the eye, in passing." Notice the "glimpse" part of this. First the glimpse. Then the glimpse given life, turned into something that illuminates the moment and may, if we're lucky—that word again—have even further-ranging consequences and meaning. The short story writer's task is to invest the glimpse with all that is in his power. He'll bring his intelligence and literary skill to bear (his talent), his sense of proportion and sense of the fitness of things: of how things out there really are and how he sees those things—like no one else sees them. And this is done through the use of clear and specific language, language used so as to bring to life the details that will light up the story for the reader. For the details to be concrete and convey meaning, the language must be accurate and precisely given. The words can be so precise they may even sound flat, but they can still carry; if used right, they can hit all the notes.

Sunday, September 25, 2005

Sinclair Lewis Quote

"When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying the cross." -- Sinclair Lewis

Monday, September 19, 2005

California man accused in serial killings - Crime & Punishment - MSNBC.com

He once appeared on the Dating Game.

Print Story: Psychopaths could be best financial traders? on Yahoo! News

Print Story: Psychopaths could be best financial traders? on Yahoo! News: "Back to Story - Help
Psychopaths could be best financial traders? Mon Sep 19, 2:45 PM ET


'Wanted: psychopaths to make a killing in the markets.'"

Sunday, August 07, 2005

Welcome to the Slush Zone

Please check out my latest experiment. Goggles and lab coats not required.

Sunday, July 31, 2005

Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest 2005 Results

for those of you not familiar with the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, this contest encourages bad writing. The entry with the worse opening of a fake novel wins. Here is the 2005 winning entry.

As he stared at her ample bosom, he daydreamed of the dual Stromberg carburetors in his vintage Triumph Spitfire, highly functional yet pleasingly formed, perched prominently on top of the intake manifold, aching for experienced hands, the small knurled caps of the oil dampeners begging to be inspected and adjusted as described in chapter seven of the shop manual.

Dan McKay
Fargo, ND

Tuesday, July 26, 2005

The story that changed the world - The Boston Globe - Boston.com - Books - A&E

How a subtitle became a bestseller
By Mark Feeney, Globe Staff | July 25, 2005

It's easy to name the elements that can contribute to a book's success: the story, the author, the title. Even the dust jacket can make a difference. But the subtitle?

As publishing sensations go, it's not exactly Harry Potter or ''The Da Vinci Code." But for several years, nonfiction titles containing the words ''changed the world" (or a variation thereon) have become a publishing standby. (See accompanying list on B9.)

Link to the rest of the story by clicking on Title.

Monday, July 11, 2005

Speculative Fiction Contest

Found this contest for speculative fiction writers. You know who you are.

Wednesday, July 06, 2005

'Sybil's Garage' -- A new magazine for fiction

By: Diana Schwaeble
Current Editor 07/01/2005

Matthew Kressel pays tribute to Hoboken by naming his magazine Sybil's Garage.

Do you ever find yourself wishing your job was more fulfilling? Did you ever wake up one morning and decide to follow your bliss? That's what happened to Matthew Kressel, Hoboken resident, who had a career in computers when he decided to take the plunge.

The New School University

Matt Kressel always had an interest in reading, but didn't consider writing until three years ago. "I lived in a fantasy world," said Kressel. "And part of me need to express these inner feelings."

In the spring of 2002, Kressel enrolled in a science fiction writing class at The New School University. His teacher was writer Alice Turner. After taking the class, he joined a writing group to further his development as a writer. Initially, the group he was in met in Hoboken, but then his former teacher, Turner, contacted him to see if he wanted to join another group in the city.

A few years later, he had his first story, "Mortar," published by Alien Skin Magazine in December, 2004. "It took years to get to the point of having my work published," said Kressel. "You have to be surrounded by a group of people who can be supportive of your work."

The magazine

Kressel had the idea for a literary magazine and decided to test it out in the winter of 2004. He and fellow group member, Devin J. Poore, were walking along Frank Sinatra Drive in Hoboken, trying to come up with a name for the magazine. They wanted a name that was relevant to Hoboken since the writing group met there. As they passed the area near Sybil's Cave, one of them asked if it was still there and they joked that the cave had been made into a parking garage. The conversation inspired the name of the magazine, Sybil's Garage.

The first issue, self published in April 2004, only included writing from four members, who were all part of the original Hoboken writing group. Kressel and his friends did all the work from his apartment. He initially thought it might be a one-time deal, but after seeing the process, he decided to do it again, only bigger and better.

For the second issue, Kressel decided to expand the magazine to include poetry as well as fiction and non-fiction es

Tuesday, June 28, 2005

Does Your Fight Scene Pack a Punch?

By Marg McAlister

Long ago, movie directors mastered the technique of creating a convincing fight scene. Bodies crash to the floor.. chairs are upended... viewers are treated to closeups of terrified or furious faces... and the punches thrown are enough to make us wince and close our eyes. (No more of those prissy punches that fooled nobody in the early films - sneaky camera angles to hide the fact that the fist didn't really connect; loud thuds to suggest a knockout punch when anybody could see it wouldn't knock a gnat out of its flight path.)

Movie-goers are treated to multiple camera angles and sophisticated sound effects. We feel as though we're right in the middle of that fight.

Authors have it a lot harder. How can you throw the reader in the middle of the scene and feel every punch? How can you show the action without falling into the trap of sounding like a school kid enthusiastically detailing a fight, punch by punch; kick by kick?

There are just two things to keep in mind.

Remember you're a writer, not a choreographer.

Pack your fights with EMOTIONAL punch.

That's it. So simple - yet so effective.

What does a choreographer do? Plans a series of movements, step by step. He/she teaches the people performing the movements how to perform each one, and then how to put them together into a smooth routine.

Too many fight scenes in books look like a choreographer's notebook. You'll see something like this:

Briggs planted a right hook on Smith's chin. The other man reeled backwards, his arms windmilling. Briggs followed up his advantage, breathing hard. In quick succession he landed several more punches on Smith's body.

Smith fell to the ground and rolled away. "Bastard!" he grunted, and rolled again to avoid a well-aimed kick from Briggs. Cat-like, he leapt to his feet and circled Briggs, not taking his eyes off his nemesis.

"Come on!" Briggs taunted, darting in to land another punch then ducking back out of reach. "Is that the best you can do?" He feinted and laughed.

Infuriated, Smith attacked. Briggs danced back and around Smith, and in two deft moves had him on the ground, one arm up behind his back.

"Had enough?" he panted.

There are so many things wrong with the above scene it's hard to know where to start. In brief:
We have no idea who the viewpoint character is. We seem to be looking on from a distance. That means there is very little emotional involvement from the reader. To really involve your reader, do everything you can to make sure he or she 'becomes' the viewpoint character. If he gets hurt, so does the reader. If he loses... so does the reader.

The writer is "telling" rather than showing. A did this then B did that so A did this in response and B followed up with this... boring! (Can you see the choreographer at work?)

The writer uses the characters' names a lot: "Smith" and "Briggs". This tends to add distance too. The problem is that both characters are men, so constant use of "he", while not so distancing, can be confusing. It's easier to avoid these problems if you are deeply in the viewpoint of one of the characters.

The excerpt is filled with tired old expressions such as "in quick succession he landed two more punches"; "a well-aimed kick"; "cat-like, he leapt to his feet"; "in two deft moves". Expressions like this save the writer from doing much work - they roll off the tongue so easily because they've been around for so long.

How do you avoid these pitfalls and write a fight scene that works?

You forget (for the most part) the physical punches and add emotional punch. Get deep into the viewpoint of one of the characters - preferably the main character; the one the reader really identifies with. This way, readers look out through the eyes of that character. They desperately want him to win; they feel every punch. Therefore, there's a lot more emotional investment in the outcome of the fight.

Most writers seem to feel that fight scenes have to be filled with fast movement, grunts and moans and shouted epithets to telegraph the action. They feel that if you stop to tell the reader what's going on in the head of the main character, this slows things down too much.

That certainly can be the case... but in the hands of a skilled writer, tension actually builds when the action is slowed down. You need to remember that time-on-the-page is not the same as real time. Since you can't actually show the reader what is going on in real time as you can in a movie, you have to compensate by spending some time in the mind of the main character. Show us the character's thoughts. Show us the character's emotions. Help us to "feel" our way into the fight.

The easiest way to show how this works is to use an example from a published book. Here's a fight scene from ECHO BURNING by Lee Child (Bantam Press, 2001). The hero, Jack Reacher, tries to avoid the fight... and the tension builds beautifully until he is forced into a confrontation.

The guy was wearing a white tank-top shirt and he was eating chicken wings. The wings were greasy and the guy was a slob. He was dripping chicken fat off his chin and off his fingers onto his shirt. There was a dark teardrop shape right between his pecs. It was growing and spreading into an impressive stain. But the best bar-room etiquette doesn't let you linger on such a sight, and the guy caught Reacher staring.

"Who you looking at?" he said.

It was said low and aggressively, but Reacher ignored it.

"Who you looking at?" the guy said again.

Reacher's experience was, they say it once, maybe nothing's going to happen. But they say it twice, then trouble's on the way. Fundamental problem is, they take a lack of response as evidence that you're worried. That they're winning. But then, they won't let you answer, anyway.

"You looking at me?" the guy said.

"No," Reacher answered.

"Don't you be looking at me, boy," the guy said.

The way he said boy made Reacher think he was maybe a foreman in a lumber mill or a cotton operation. Whatever muscle work was done around Lubbock. Some kind of a traditional trade passed down through the generations. Certainly the word cop never came to his mind. But then he was relatively new to Texas.

"Don't you look at me," the guy said.

Reacher turned his head and looked at him. Not really to antagonize the guy. Just to size him up. Life is endlessly capable of surprises, so he knew one day he would come face to face with his physical equal. With somebody who might worry him. But he looked and saw this wasn't the day. So he just smiled and looked away again.

Then the guy jabbed him with his finger.

"I told you not to look at me," he said, and jabbed.

It was a meaty forefinger and it was covered in grease. It left a definite mark on Reacher's shirt.

"Don't do that," Reacher said.

The guy jabbed again.

"Or what?" he said. "You want to make something out of it?"

Reacher looked down. Now there were two marks. The buy jabbed again. Three jabs, three marks. Reacher clamped his teeth. What were three greasy marks on a shirt? He started a slow count to ten. Then the guy jabbed again, before he even reached eight.

"You deaf?" Reacher said. "I told you not to do that."

"You want to do something about it?"

"No," Reacher said. "I really don't. I just want you to stop doing it, is all."

The guy smiled. "Then you're a yellow-bellied piece of shit."

"Whatever," Reacher said. "Just keep your hands off me."

"Or what? What are you going to do?"

Reacher restarted his count. Eight, nine.

"You want to take this outside?" the guy asked.

Ten.

"Touch me again and you'll find out," Reacher said. "I warned you four times."

The guy paused a second. Then, of course, he went for it again. Reacher caught the finger on the way in and snapped it at the first knuckle. Just folded it upward like he was turning a door handle. Then because he was irritated he leaned forward and headbutted the guy full in the face. It was a smooth move, well-delivered, but it was backed off to maybe half of what it might have been. No need to put the guy in a coma, over four grease marks on a shirt. He moved a pace to give the man room to fall, and backed into the woman on his right.

"Excuse me, ma'am," he said.

The woman nodded vaguely, disoriented by the noise, concentrating on her drink, unaware of what was happening. The big guy thumped silently on the floorboards and Reacher used the sole of his shoe to roll him half onto his front. Then he nudged him under the chin with his toe to pull his head back and straighten his airway. The recovery position, paramedics call it. Stops you choking while you're out.

Then he paid for his drinks and walked back to his motel...

Of course, this scene just shows a quietly escalating fight and it shows a hero who has the ability to take a fight to a quick conclusion. You're going to have to use a slightly different approach if you have several people involved and if you have a fast and furious fight with two more evenly matched aggressors. But the principle is the same.

Don't let the reader watch the fight from a distance. Get them into the skin of the main character, privy to his thoughts and his emotions. Let readers feel the impact of fists and feet; let them experience the adrenaline (or irritation, depending on the level of provocation). Then your fight scenes will pack the kind of punch you want.

(c) copyright Marg McAlister

Marg McAlister has published magazine articles, short stories, books for children, ezines, promotional material, sales letters and web content. She has written 5 distance education courses on writing, and her online help for writers is popular all over the world. Sign up for her regular writers' tipsheet at http://www.writing4success.com/

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/

Fictitious Force

Fictitious Force

A New Speculative Fiction Market

Monday, June 27, 2005

Buying the Cow, Though the Milk Is Free: Why Some Publishers Are Digitizing Themselves

June 24, 2005
By Anna Weinberg

On June 19, Cory Doctorow announced on his blog boingboing.net that his third novel, Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town, had just been published by Tor Books. More interestingly, he also announced that the entire text of the book, like the text of his two previous novels, was available online under copyright terms that allow the “unlimited, noncommercial redistribution of the text.” While major publishing houses are digging in for a long fight with Google over making digital versions of books available online (in partial, “fair use” excerpts), Doctorow invites his readers to “send around, paste it into a chat, beam it to a friend's PDA, or print out a chapter to hand out in the university common room.” Further, through the terms of Doctorow’s Creative Commons license, people in developing nations are free to sell print versions of the book for their own profit—as long as they sell them only in developing nations.

Not that Doctorow is opposed to commercial success—he derides “fuzzy-headed ‘information-wants-to-be-free’ info-hippies” on his website craphound.com. In fact, he makes it very clear that he considers the release of the entire text of his books into the wilds of the Internet to be first and foremost a marketing tool. “From where I sit as a mid-list writer struggling to break in and break out, this has been a good thing for me,” he says. Doctorow’s first novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, has been downloaded from his website half-a-million times. “If every one of those were a sale, this would be one of the bestselling sci-fi books of all time,” he says.
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Read the rest of the article at the above link to The Book Standard, a site that is bookmark worthy.

Tuesday, June 21, 2005

Shimmer Magazine - New Speculative Market

Shimmer Magazine is now accepting submissions for their October 2005 issue.

Shimmer is a new speculative fiction magazine, published quarterly. Each issue will contain new fiction from emerging and established writers - fantasy, science fiction, horror, magical realism, and stories that defy categorization.

Sunday, June 19, 2005

New model 'permits time travel'

For all you sci-fi writers (or readers), check out this intriguing article from the BBC about Time Travel. Please access at the above link. I've included the first paragraph below, a carrot dangled in front of your nose.


The concept of time-travel is laden with uncomfortable paradoxes
If you went back in time and met your teenage parents, you could not split them up and prevent your birth - even if you wanted to, a new quantum model has stated.

Monday, June 13, 2005

A New Romance

By ALEX WITCHEL

Published: June 12, 2005

"Troy let the towel on his waist drop. The morning light falling into the room put his abs and pecs and nipples into perfect relief. • Brad gasped, as if it was the first time he had seen what was hidden beneath. Troy was a magnificent specimen of manhood. At 33, three years older than Brad, he had the firm, hard stomach of a high-school athlete. His muscles were naturally lean and ropy; he was strong, but he had none of the false bulk of a steroid queen.'
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This is a new release. To read more, click on the link to the New York Times website. The article is too long to post.

Friday, June 10, 2005

'A test of absolute faith'

'Writing a novel, I discovered then, in that initial fumbling stage, is a test of absolute faith and absolute endurance. It puts you in a position of vulnerability at the same time as handing you a wand. For me, it felt like wading out into the sea on a raft in the dark and staying there all night, drifting and surging, worrying a lot, until the morning comes up and you can see where you are. That's when the real work begins - the task of getting all that colour, all those images and meanings succinctly, with the right pitch.'

Diana Evans, on writing her first novel 26a, in the Observer

Tuesday, June 07, 2005

Mining Your Novel for Gold

Mining Your Novel for Gold

Got an unsold novel languishing in a drawer? There's hope for it yet—here's how to pull short stories from those pages, which can get you published and ignite more interest in the novel itself.

by William Barton


It hurts to be told that no one wants your novel, whether it's your first or your fifth, whether you've been previously published or not. All those months, even years, of labor seem wasted. All those painfully chosen words now seem destined to reside forever in a forgotten desk drawer.

But it doesn't have to be that way. Part of establishing a writing career is learning to be patient, creative and, most of all, resilient. No one wants your novel? Then salvage its best parts and turn them into short stories. With your care and commitment, those stories will find a life of their own—and possibly keep your career afloat at the same time.

Ups and downs

I learned the hard way that publication isn't necessarily a magic bullet. My first two novels were published, but my third manuscript didn't sell, so I kept myself in the business by writing nonfiction books about computers. Still, I stuck with my fiction writing and eventually got back in the game, publishing three more novels and submitting a fourth to publishers. But while I was outlining my fifth novel, my agent called and broke the news: No one was interested in the fourth manuscript.

As I considered my next move, it occurred to me that I'd never written any short fiction. Short stories, it seemed, might provide me with a quicker route back into novel publishing than nonfiction books had. So I reworked the still-incomplete outline of my fifth novel, removing everything but the principal plot, and wound up with 28,000 words. I sold the resulting story, "Almost Forever," for serialization in a small-press magazine, Tomorrow Science Fiction.

On the strength of that sale, I was able to write and sell more short stories to higher-profile markets and eventually another book. That got me back on track again and, in time, I had six more novels in print. Then one day, my editor called. "Your sales are poor. We won't be buying any more books." It was time to start over.

From flotsam to fiction

I'd kept my newfound short-fiction career in operation while I wrote those six novels, but now I had 107,000 words about to go to waste. So when a local college literary magazine called, offering me $50 for a short story, I offered them a novel excerpt instead. They agreed to consider an 8,000-word submission. I selected what I knew was my novel's most dramatic chapter and cut 16,000 words. There were lavish sex scenes that would seem out of place in a literary magazine, foreshadowing of later events the readers would never see, back-references to earlier events—all of these got the ax. I hit the 8,000-word mark, and North Carolina Literary Review accepted my story.

I was inspecting the original manuscript for more encapsulated stories to sell when I remembered the condensation I'd done of "Almost Forever." But this novel, Moments of Inertia, was a first-person narrative. There were no subplots to remove, and everything took place in front of the viewpoint character. This time I'd identify the core of the story and work outward, finding material that couldn't be left out.

I went through the book and collected the dramatic peaks—the cores of each chapter, like the cliffhanger endings of old movie serials. I found myself with a short-ish story too fractured to make any sense. I combed the manuscript again, looking for scenes that related to those peaks, finding elements whose content was essential to understanding the whole. What I wound up with was a long, uneven novella, with a prosaic beginning that shifted to violent action somewhere in the middle. I kept working.

There's no law that says a story has to be told in any particular order, of course. So I cut the story in half, starting with one of the dramatic peaks I'd chosen for the excerpt, continuing forward to what had been the end of the book. Then I took the first half of the story and distributed its scenes between the others, placing each one after a later scene that referred to it. I wound up with a story that delivered reward after reward, keeping the reader going to the final climax. By the time I finished wielding the editorial blowtorch, I'd reduced my 107,000-word novel to a 12,500-word short story, which subsequently appeared in the April/May 2004 issue of Asimov's Science Fiction.

With 20,000 words sold, I went through my novel again, looking for anything else that could work as a stand-alone story. What I found were two chapters that, side by side, made up a harrowing tale with an ending of their own. I sold these 14,000 words, now called "Dark of the Sun," to Asimov's, as well. I also found a single, 1,000-word dramatic scene that told its own story. It was published as "On the Beach" in The Urban Hiker.

What happens to a novel once you've extracted short fiction from it? The stories you sold may attract enough attention to interest book publishers, and you may be able to sell the novel itself in its original form. Or you may be able to publish a book that's a collection of your short fiction, in which the stories from your novel appear.

And even if your novel gets published only as short stories, remember the most important thing: Readers saw your writing. You were paid for the work you did, and the exposure those stories earned may help sell the next novel you write. In the end, publication never hurts, no matter what form it takes. And there are stories in your unsold novel, just waiting to be found.

Friday, June 03, 2005

Guardian Unlimited | Special reports | Exploding toilet leads to lawsuit

Associated Press in Morgantown
Saturday June 4, 2005
The Guardian

A man who says he was severely burned when a portable toilet exploded after he sat down and lit a cigarette is suing a general contractor and a coal company, accusing them of negligence.

John Jenkins, 53, and his wife, Ramona, 35, of Brave, Pennsylvania, are seeking $10m (£6m) in damages from Chisler Inc and Eastern Associated Coal.

The lawsuit claims Mr Jenkins's face, neck, arms, torso and legs were severely burned last July after the cigarette ignited methane gas leaking from a pipe underneath the toilet unit.

"When I struck the lighter, the whole thing just detonated - the whole top blew off," said Mr Jenkins, a methane power plant operator with North West Fuels Development. "I can't tell you if it blew me out the door or if I jumped out."

Eastern Associated owns the property where the explosion occurred.

Mr Jenkins alleges that heavy equipment from Chisler ran over the pipelines before the explosion, causing the methane gas leak.

I Do Not Have Time To Read This Crap

WRITER'S LIFE
Fiction
May, 2005

Fiction editors talk about unsolicited submissions
By  Anne Allen

Editors are too often cast as ogres, but the piles of crap they face is a real eye-opener.
On my British editor’s desk is a rubber stamp that prints, in red ink, the words “I do not have time to read this crap.” Its blood-coloured imprint adorns several submission letters that lie scattered around his office.

I feel sad for the rejected novelists, although of course their manuscripts were returned long ago with a polite rejection letter.

So I asked him, and some of our other editors — how does a fiction submission avoid the dreaded red stamp and get a sympathetic read?

Unfortunately, the sympathetic part seems fairly subjective — mostly based on personal tastes — but here are a few major mistakes that fiction editors at my publishing house, Shadowline, say will propel your novel directly into the “crap” file.

1) Death threats in your cover letter.

I’m not making this up. Editors get them more often than you imagine.

A query/cover letter is a business document — essentially a job application. It may accompany a one-page synopsis (the norm in the U.S. these days) or a full manuscript (still accepted here at Shadowline). But it is with that letter that your working relationship with your editor begins and, all too often, ends. Remember it should be short, professional and to the point. Say who you are, what you’ve written and why you’ve sent it to this particular publisher. Full stop.

My editor hopes to compile his collection of bad cover letters into a comedy script some day, so I mustn’t steal his thunder, but suffice it to say that threatening publishers with various forms of witchcraft and/or body mutilation if you are not immediately given a an advance the size of the company’s annual budget will probably not get your novel published.

Although you may achieve immortality in an upcoming sketch on Radio Four.

You also want to avoid personal insults, suicide threats and/or generally whining about your rotten life. It’s about your novel. Only about your novel.

2) Amateurish writing.

Don’t try to run before you can walk.

A person who’s just learned to lob a tennis ball over the net doesn’t expect to compete at Wimbledon, and someone who’s recently hammered her first nail doesn’t expect to be hired to build the next Trump Tower. But for some reason, may beginners believe their first attempt at a novel is going to make a major publisher’s spring list.

This doesn’t happen. Fiction writing is a discipline. And for an eternal lack of a better word, it is a craft. A profession. So take classes. Read how-to books. Join a critique group. Go to workshops and conferences. Chances are, you shouldn’t send out your first novel. Keep it in a drawer and write a couple more.

Some day you’ll thank me for telling you that. I personally learned this lesson the hard, and embarrassing, way.

3) Not reading contemporary fiction.

You can’t write what you don’t read. Don’t fake it. The editor can tell. Write what you read and read what you write.

You need to know who’s publishing books like the one you’ve written, and where to find them in a bookstore. Film and TV references give you away as a non-reader. If you’ve written a forensic science whodunit, compare your sleuth to Kay Scarpetta: don’t just pitch your work as CSI: Peoria.

Specific genres have specific rules. Learn them. The only kind of fiction that can break rules is literary fiction, but if you prefer to read Grisham, don’t attempt the magical realism of Garcia Marquez or the kaleidoscopic character studies of Michael Cunningham.

4) Bad grammar and haphazard spelling.

No editor is going to waste a minute of her overbooked time reading awhole novel written by somebody who can’t be bothered to use her computer’s spellcheck function. Or hasn’t found out where to put an apostrophe.

Get somebody to proofread for you. It’s hard to spot your own mistakes, because you know what you meant to say and your brain sometimes sees the correct version instead of what’s on the page.

And, the editors remind me, never rely on spellcheck alone, or yule seam a compete full.

Thursday, June 02, 2005

Department Stores: A New Home for Indie Booksellers?

Department Stores: A New Home for Indie Booksellers?
May 31, 2005
By Rachel Deahl

A shopper walking through the main floor of Marshall Field’s flagship department store on Chicago’s State Street will pass a number of branded boutiques, ranging from high-end clothing shops, like BCBG and Max Azria, to one less-expected carve-out: Barbara’s Bookstore. While a decade or more ago, many department stores had in-house book departments, few, if any, indie booksellers—of which Barbara’s is one of the Chicago area’s most beloved—have ever taken up residence in one. But now, as the department store business attempts to reinvigorate itself, more branded storefronts are being invited into large retail centers. Should Barbara’s prove successful on State Street, indie bookshops may just show up all over, wedged between Crate & Barrel and The Gap.

Barbara’s owner, Don Barliant, explains that, at his operation, which opened in Marshall Field’s in 2003, the chain takes the bulk of the profits. Customers actually pay the department store for every purchase, with a percentage of each sale going to Barbara’s, which provides the staff and stocks the store. (Barbara’s staffers, after being trained by Field’s, are added to the department store’s payroll and benefits plan.) Barliant says the arrangement is doubly advantageous: It helps build awareness of the Barbara’s brand and—despite the revenue-sharing agreement that favors Field’s—the number of dollar signs tends to be high. “If there’s a book at Marshall Field’s, we provide it,” Barliant explains. In addition to the strong sales coming from the high-traffic downtown location, Barliant now provides books for other departments in the company’s local and non-local locations. Thus, Barbara’s inventory can appear everywhere from a cookware display to a storefront window.



Barliant, who is currently in discussions with Marshall Field’s to open another location in the chain’s planned Minneapolis outpost, says his shop’s presence in Marshall Field’s ultimately does what all small booksellers need to do: Bring books to the places where the customers are. The key, Barliant says, is getting books to non-traditional locations.

The partnership is promising for Field’s as well, since department stores—suffering many of the same woes as bookstores—need to find unique ways to battle back into a marketplace dominated by mega-retailers like Target and K-Mart. The department store business has been stuck in “a no man’s land” for the past two decades, says Amanda Nicholson, director of the Retail Management & Consumer Studies Department at Boston College, losing business to discount retailers and specialty chains like Banana Republic and Ann Taylor. “On one end, you have the powerful discount chains which in the last 20 years have really taken a lot of the market share and then, at the other end, you have the specialty store chains like The Gap and Banana Republic,” she says. “People used to go to department stores to buy all their clothes, and that’s changed.”

In fact, Marshall Field’s has “added or invigorated” 500 new vendors and brands at its State Street store since 2003, says Jennifer McNamara, a Field’s spokesperson, with the goal of creating “an environment unlike anything in retail.” Marshall Field’s, says Bart Weitz, director of the Miller Center for Retailing at the University of Florida, “wants to have something that’s unique and different, so Barbara’s is ideal for that. People can go to a Borders anywhere.” And what’s happening at State Street likely points to imminent changes at the store’s 62 other locations throughout the Midwest, and, perhaps, at Macy’s Bloomingdale’s and other department store chains. “If the Barbara’s location is working for Marshall Field’s,” says Nicholson, “then another company will be looking for similar deals.”

Wednesday, June 01, 2005

CBS News | Dracula Novel Earns $2M Advance | June 1, 2005�17:00:12

Dracula Novel Earns $2M Advance
(Page 1 of 2)

ANN ARBOR, Mich., June 1, 2005

(AP) Elizabeth Kostova used some unconventional ingredients from her own life — a childhood spent listening to Dracula tales, a love of Balkan folk music and a passion for libraries — to produce a debut novel that earned her a breathtaking $2 million advance.

Despite its quirky origins, publisher Little, Brown and Co. is hoping "The Historian" will grab readers' imaginations in much the same way as Dan Brown's "The Da Vinci Code," another historical adventure-mystery that has sold more than 17 million copies around the world and been translated into 44 languages.
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Interesting article about a writer's perserverance and willingness to undertake countless rewrites. Sound familiar?

Noteworthy point--this was the author's first novel.

Click on the link to access the article at cbsnews.com

Saturday, May 28, 2005

Backstory

May 24, 2005

Marianne Mancusi's Backstory

I always wanted to write a book. So one day I got a hold of a copy of 'The Writer's Market' and started looking through it. There, I found pages upon pages of publishers looking for books. I came across Harlequin and decided they looked like they'd be an easy place to get published. After all, they publish so many books, certainly they must be dying for submissions, right? " . . .


Read the rest of this article at Backstory, a great site featuring the author's story behind writing and publishing their book.

Wednesday, May 25, 2005

Has Book Publishing Returned to Pre-9/11 Business?

May 24, 2005
By Rachel Deahl

More books were released last year than ever before, according to a new study from R.R. Bowker. The statistics, released today, indicate U.S. publishers put out significantly more titles in 2004, jumping 14% from the previous year, to total 195,000, an all-time high for the industry. Andrew Grabois, Bowker’s director of publisher relations, says the rise points to a “return to a pre-9/11 pattern of publishing.” Grabois says the numbers point to an overall shift in the industry as publishers are now betting on the fact that the public is ready for more “escapist and self-help” fare, after being “exhausted by four years of terrorism, war, and polarizing elections.”

While the Bowker study does not reflect sales of books, and, therefore, industry revenues, it does point to the fact that there is a vast number of titles in the marketplace coming from sources other than the 12 major houses. Grabois says that, while vanity presses and POD companies make up for approximately 50,000 of the total number of titles released, the other 145,000 are coming from a combination of minor and major industry players. The Bowker study also touches on interesting trends in adult fiction, university press output, the growth of various genre categories, book pricing and translations of English titles.



Adult fiction, which accounted for 25,184 of the new titles in 2004, increased a hefty 43.1% from 2003, the highest jump ever recorded for the category. Interestingly, the large houses contributed modestly to this growth, increasing their output in the category only 3.5% from the previous year. Nonetheless, the overall growth means that adult fiction now accounts for 14% of all titles published in the country.

Grabois credits the difference in the output of adult fiction between the major houses and all other publishers with the fact that the biggest industry players are following a more conservative business model. Recognizing there might be more of a consumer interest in the category, Grabois says the major houses are still “a bit more cautious” and won’t “do a 180-degree turn in one or two seasons.”

Major trade houses released a total of 24,159 new titles, up 5.4% from 2003, Bowker reported. University presses also raised their output, releasing 14,484 titles, up 12.3% from the previous year. The strong numbers for university presses point to a turnaround in business, since the group saw a decline of 4.3% from 2002 to 2003.

Grabois says the university presses were able to turn business around by returning to their standard model, which had changed after 9/11. “[The University Presses] were hurt a lot by post-9/11 trends because they tried to gain a foothold in the trade market since there was such an interest in Afghanistan and terrorism and wound up over-publishing. They’ve cut back and now seem to be finding their sea legs again.”

Juvenile titles saw a marked rise in 2004, up 6.6% to 21,516, marking another industry high. And in the adult nonfiction category, the genres enjoying the largest increases included religion, travel and home economics. The big houses filled out their lists by releasing more titles in business, juvenile, law, sociology and travel, while cutting back markedly on religion, poetry and literary fiction.

Another decreasing area in the industry, according to Bowker, is translations of English titles; in 2004 4,040 books were translated from English into another language, a drop of 8.1% from the previous year.

As for pricing, the suggested retail price of various formats went up, for the most, with the exception of adult hardcovers, which dropped $.10 to $27.52. Adult fiction hardcovers remained the same at $25.08 while both adult trade paperbacks and adult fiction paperbacks saw a jump in price; the former rose $.11 to $15.76 and the latter climbed $.07 to $14.78.

A category seeing growth, surprisingly, is poetry, which jumped 40.5% from 2003 to 2004. Bowker, which tracks poetry and drama together, indicates that 1,779 more titles from the combined category appeared from 2003 to 2004. Despite the fact that poetry is not a big seller for the major houses, a number of POD publishers and vanity presses release a steady stream of titles in the category; Grabois estimates that poetry, drama and fiction account for 50% of the titles coming from POD and vanity presses.

Tuesday, May 24, 2005

Comment

'Underestimating the reading public'

‘I would say the biggest problem is underestimating the reading audience. I've always written cross-genre books: a suspense novel with a love story inside and some comedy. But publishers resisted this strenuously. Everything has to be labelled, and sold that way. If you're writing a series, there is pressure to keep things narrow and not break out. Books like Herman Wouk's The Winds of War and James Clavell's Shogun have largely disappeared from the bestseller list. The common wisdom is that readers don't have the patience they once did. But underestimating the reading public is a very big mistake. If there was more trust in the public, it would pay off. An editor once told me that if I didn't keep my vocabulary to 500 words I'd never make the best-seller list.’

Dean Koontz, who sells about 17 million copies of his books and gets over 30,000 fan letters a year, in the Wall Street Journal

Sunday, May 22, 2005

Crippled Detectives or The War of the Red Romer

I read about this story in the Village Voice. A story called, "Crippled Detectives" was written and illustrated by a 7 year old and published in a magazine called Stone Soup. The above link will take you to the story, which is supposed to be "fabulously funny." Soon after the story was published, the author was diagnosed with bipolar disease.

Defense, Prosecution Play to New 'CSI' Savvy

Apparently, jurors who watch CSI take the program too much to heart. The show has dramatically affected courtroom cases across the country. Jurors expect to see the same forensic evidence they see on TV. But in real life, forensic evidence is not always available.

Tuesday, May 17, 2005

CNN.com Specials

CNN has a special report this week on forensics at 7PM ET. They also have supplementary data at their website posted above. Make no bones about it--this is definitely worth a gander for research or if you have an interest in crime detection.

So, wipe the dirt off your boots and dig in.

Thursday, May 12, 2005

Would You, Could You in a Box? (Write, That Is.) - New York Times

By JULIE SALAMON

Published: May 9, 2005

The novelist Laurie Stone understood that her desire to go into the box was a symptom of something, she just didn't know of what. Ms. Stone, 58, will have a month to consider her decision from the confines of a sleek-angled structure, about 140 square feet, whose walls resemble shoji screens made not of rice paper but of translucent cellular plastic panels. Her temporary home was built just for her, in a converted factory in Queens.

On Saturday night, in front of 200 onlookers, Ms. Stone and two other novelists, ensconced in neighboring pods, embarked on a variation of the spectator sports made familiar by reality television. Ms. Stone, Ranbir Sidhu and Grant Bailie are the participants in "Novel: A Living Installation" at the Flux Factory, an artists' collective in Long Island City. The goal is for each to complete a novel by June 4. The purpose is to consider the private and public aspects of writing.

No cameras will record this voyeuristic experiment, though visitors can peep occasionally (Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays from 3 p.m. to 5 p.m.; and Saturdays and Sundays from noon to 4 p.m). The potential for public humiliation comes not from the perils of constant surveillance, but from the more familiar writers' problem of failing to meet a deadline. Make that deadlines. They will give weekly readings of their works in progress on Saturdays at 8 p.m., and take part in two public discussions scheduled for this coming Sunday and May 22.

What the novelists write is not as important as how they live while they are writing. Each habitat was designed by builders who, like the writers, entered a competition. The writers can emerge for only 90 minutes a day and must record on time cards the reason for their absence (laundry, bathroom, snacks). Each evening they will gather together to eat a meal cooked by a chef from a local restaurant.

For the Flux Factory curators, the exhibition (or exhibitionism) is an extension of an experiment their group has been conducting for a decade. Seventeen of the mostly youthful Fluxers, as they call themselves, live in the Flux Factory, a 7,500-square-foot space, which has the trappings of a college commune. ("Novel" is in the 2,000 square feet set aside for exhibitions.) The Fluxers' mission is to constantly consider the relationship between life and art, a process oiled by grant money.

The idea for "Novel" came to Morgan Meis, 32, a founder and the president of Flux Factory, as he was trying to finish his dissertation on the Marxist philosopher and critic Walter Benjamin, and his theories of experience. "I said I should do a project called 'Dissertation' where I lock myself in a box" and just finish the thing, Mr. Meis said.

Instead, he staged this show, together with Kerry Downey, 25, a fellow Fluxer. They put out notices on various Web sites, at graduate schools and architecture firms. Two hundred writers and a dozen designers applied.

With no money at stake and little prospect for celebrity, why did the writers, all past the age of youthful impulse, decide to participate?

Ms. Stone, a trim, lively woman with stylish short hair, was drawn by the isolation. "The idea of escaping from TV, all media, was very appealing to me," she said, in an interview before the experiment began. She came with the essentials: books, makeup and linens. Her main worry was that she would not adjust well to living in such close proximity with strangers. "I'm afraid I won't be flexible," she said, "I won't be happy. I'll be rigid and terrified."

The writing and reading aspect did not alarm her. "What's the worst that can happen?" she asked, and laughed. "I'll be terrible and give a bad reading. I'm extremely experienced with that."

Mr. Bailie, 43, had different motives. He received some fine reviews for his first novel, "Cloud 8," published in 2002, but earns a living as a security supervisor for an office complex and mall in downtown Cleveland. Mr. Bailie, who paid for his plane ticket to New York, also has a wife and two children from a previous marriage, so his writing time is limited.

"I could write a better book if I were locked up for a while," he said Saturday night at the party that preceded his semiseclusion, which began minutes after 9 o'clock. Mr. Bailie, dressed in all-black for the occasion, said he was not nervous. "But then, I've had a few beers," he added.

His space resembled a cross between a rustic hut and a primitive ship's cabin (but with electrical outlets). Its designer, Ian Montgomery, 24, is a carpenter and fine arts graduate of Bard College who has lived at the Flux Factory for eight months. In keeping with the Fluxers' experimental gestalt, Mr. Montgomery, with a mop of curly hair and a beard, wore a casual black dress over his jeans. Barefoot as he navigated his creation, he explained why he had decided to include a "grow table," a board covered with dirt sprouting wheat germ, clover and rye.

"I'm really interested in the potential energy that can be exerted in a short amount of time by plants and writers," he said.

The third writer, Mr. Sidhu, 38, moved to California from India when he was 13, and has lived in New York for seven years. He was looking for freelance work when he saw an ad for the project on Craig's List. "This seemed so much more interesting," he said. "The business models are consolidating and making publishing narrower and narrower, whereas this breaks open that model through play, refocusing on what's really important, which is the writing itself."

Mr. Sidhu will be living in an airy space defined by various boxes and movable plexiglass walls designed by two graduate architecture students at Columbia University, Mitch McEwen and Kwi-Hae Kim.

Paul Davis, one of the architects who designed Ms. Stone's abode, had been up all night adding the finishing touches and was still attaching panels with a staple gun an hour before Ms. Stone secluded herself.

Mr. Davis, 43, has sleek good looks that seem more suited to a martini ad than a warehouse art-happening. His firm, Salazar Davis, mostly does fancy residential and retail jobs, with clients that include Agnès B. and Air America radio.

He said he loved his break from the functional: "It was fun to remove ourselves from the practical business of selling something and be set loose to explore the ramifications of what it is to inhabit a place."

Tuesday, May 10, 2005

Anne Rice Gets Biblical in Her Next Book - Yahoo! News

Anne Rice Gets Biblical in Her Next Book Sat May 7,10:06 AM ET

NEW YORK - Vampires are usually her passion, but Anne Rice is getting biblical in her next book, due out in November from publisher Random House. "Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt" will tell the story of Jesus' early years in his own words.

Excerpts of a lengthy letter that will accompany advance review copies of the book this summer are published in the new issue of Entertainment Weekly magazine.

"For over 10 years I've wanted to do this book — Jesus in his own words," Rice writes. "For five years, I've been obsessed with how to do it, and for the last three years I've been consumed with nothing else."

Rice, who has moved from New Orleans to San Diego, brought the undead back to life in the 1970s with "Interview With the Vampire."

"I'm not a priest," Rice also writes in the letter. "I can't be one. I'll never be able to go to the altar of the Lord and say the words of consecration at Mass, `This is my body. This is my blood.' No, I can't work that magnificent Eucharistic miracle. But in humility, I have attempted something transformative which we writers dare to call a miracle in the imperfect human idiom we possess. It's to bring Him here in the form a story, and that story is Christ The Lord."

Friday, May 06, 2005

Fight over finger found in custard

The man that discovered the finger in his custard refuses to "hand" it over to authorities.

Read all about it by clicking on the title link.

Thursday, April 28, 2005

New York Post Online Edition: JUSTICE Magazine

IT'S TURNSTILE JUSTICE

By KEITH J. KELLY
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April 27, 2005 -- Media Ink

JUSTICE Magazine, the new true-crime title, that debuts on the longest day of the year (June 21) will be sold in Wal-Mart stores nationwide.

It's something of a coup for a start-up title to be carried on the racks at the nation's largest retailer. "We're locked and loaded," said Randall Lane, the president and editor-in-chief, who's promising advertisers he'll sell 250,000 copies of the bi-monthly.

The launch has a star-studded lineup of columnists: Marcia Clark, the lead prosecutor on the O.J. Simpson case, will write a consumer advice column called The Advocate; and Mark Geragos, defense attorney for Scott Peterson and until he got the boot, for Michael Jackson, will co-write the Opening Arguments column with Nancy Grace, the ex-Atlanta prosecutor who has her own CNN Headline News show and frequently subs for Larry King on his show. Also included will be former FBI man Joe Pistone, who was immortalized by Johnny Depp in the 1997 movie "Donnie Brasco" about his years undercover in the mob.



*



Bravo and Hearst Entertainment are partnering for a new documentary series based on the New York Daily News.

Bravo, which brought us "Queer Eye for the Straight Guy," said it has inked a deal to produce six one-hour episodes, based on the inner workings of the Daily News. The show should be able to answer once and for all: Does the new Editor-in-Chief Michael Cooke doze off during the morning editorial meeting — giving new meaning to the term "Daily Snooze."

Said one source: "He zones out. It's hard to tell whether he's actually asleep or not. He has a Zen-like expression on his face." A Cooke defender inside the paper insisted that Cooke "only fell asleep once."

A spokesperson at Bravo offered "no comment" on that vital question. Of course, Bravo already missed the biggest drama of the year when the News' Scratch n' Stiff scandal erupted after it printed the wrong winning numbers for the bingo-card contest.

The show is scheduled to debut some time next year. There should be plenty of drama ahead as Cooke, the British-born editor, tries to remake New York's struggling "hometown paper." Of course, Cooke might want to take better care as to where he holds his business meetings. Our spy recognized him enjoying a drink — or three — at Aquavit on Sunday evening. There the "Cookie Monster" told a trusted aide the Snooze's pagination department is "a disaster."

The reporters at the Police Shack might also want to watch out: The Cookie Monster said that the Snooze is getting beat on crime stories. And he also offered that the columnists may have to get used to the idea of getting by on less.



*

Silvano Machetto, who is celebrating the 30th anniversary of the Village media hot spot Da Silvano's on Sunday night, will have more than one reason to celebrate. His wife Marisa Acocella, whose cartoons have appeared in The New Yorker, just sold her graphic memoir, "Cancer Vixen" to Knopf.

Many of the restaurant's regulars, including Nan Graham of Simon & Schuster and Bill Shinker of Gotham Books, tracked down the cartoonist author through the restaurant after reading about her in Glamour and the New York Times.

Publishers Weekly said Acocella snagged a cool $250,000 for the book, which is a cartoon version of her successful battle against breast cancer, set against a backdrop of the media elite who frequent the restaurant. It attracted a wide audience of bidders, including Bloomsbury and Rodale, but it was ultimately won by Sonny Mehta at Knopf.

kkelly@nypost.com

Tuesday, April 26, 2005

'Grey is the New Black'

25 April 2005

'Grey is the New Black'

This was the title given to a session at the recent UK Booksellers' Association conference in Glasgow which focused attention on the growing importance of grey readers. Steve Bohme of Book Marketing Limited showed the increasing importance of this market, as the baby boom generation hits retirement. He said they represent ‘a huge opportunity, particularly for independent booksellers’. Henley Centre research already shows that in the past five years the value of UK book sales to 55 to 74 year olds has risen by 31%.

The increasing size of the grey market is a worldwide trend, shared by the US and by northern European countries where the population is ageing fast and living longer. US figures show that no less than 75 million live births were recorded between the years 1946 and 1965. The oldest cohort in this baby boom generation is just hitting retirement.

Henley figures show that spending by the over-fifties in Western Europe has increased three times faster than for any other group. In the past the baby boomers have crashed through each age group, imposing their own view of what that age represents. Now they are approaching retirement age with an unprecedented amount of money and the determination that they will enjoy their retirement.

In the UK the Saga organisation has made a huge success out of selling a wide range of services to the growing market of over-fifties. Emma Soames, the influential editor of Saga magazine, identified two core parts of this older market. There’s the ‘war old and the new old. The war old are probably the last generation who would prefer to borrow rather than buy. The new old have been consumers all their lives, baby boomers who have been buying since the days of the Beatles and Biba. They are much more like their children than their parents and many of them will go on saying they are middle-aged long into their seventies.’ But 95% of marketing spend in the UK is aimed at under fifties, according to the Henley Centre, and business seems terrified of openly approaching this huge market which is rapidly presenting itself.

As regards the book business, Richard Samson of Chrysalis cautioned against clinging to long-held assumptions of what this older market might like to read: ‘The 55 to 74s are buying less romance, cookery, health, business and DIY, and more crime, travel, sport, fitness and diet, humour and entertainment books.’ In short, the new greys are carrying their interests and reading tastes with them as they get older and have more time to devote to reading. Unlike the generations before them, many of them will have the money and lengthy retirement to indulge their interests. They are already starting to redefine retirement and it looks like this powerful group will present a completely different set of older readers, many of whom are keen book buyers.

Saturday, April 23, 2005

What's the Hardest Thing About Writing?

Lately, I've been struggling to get back on track with my writing after being sick for a week. I found myself questioning my abilities and passion for writing. After beating myself up for about a week, I decided to stop qualifying myself and get down to the basics and start writing again, which I did.

Writing is such a psychological endeavor, sending a writer on so many high and lows they may blame "el nino" for the rapid shift in their demeanor. That is why it is so important to have a sense of community. Writing is such a lonely job, we often wonder if we are not crazy to be pursuing such lofty goals as trying to get published. What is it that drives us to such obsessive degrees? My theory is that writers thrive on the thrill. The thrill of writing. The thrill of waiting to hear if something will be published. After bottoming out from rejection, the thrill of taking the ride back up again to the top and doing it all over again. We are thrill seekers, sitting on our chairs, staring at the computer screen, poised to create something wonderful, something memorable, and possibly, something publishable.

Are we gluttons for punishment? Absolutely. We need that feeling of euphoria after being pummeled by rejections. Writing is our drug, our way to make it through and day or week without losing our minds. Often I find I become cranky when I haven't written anything in a while. Now, I believe that it is anything I should be writing when I feel I cannot produce anything worthy of praise. After all, it is the "high" of writing "anything" that gets us through the day. Because it is only when we go back to edit something that we realize its true merits or deficits. After all, God created the wastebasket and virtual trash bin for garbage. There is a place for mediocrity.

We should be grateful for our ability to reach a high on a moment's notice, to reach distant places and alternate universes at the click of a key. Who else can perform such a feat of daring?

In this lonely world of writing, a writer needs companionship and comfort from other writers. We need a place to visit or call, where we can reach out to someone who understands the trial and tribulations of trying to crank out the written word.

That is why I ask: What is the hardest thing about writing? I would like to hear back from you and engage you in a dialogue. We need each other to fall back on in times of grief and shout out to in times of jubilation. Our endeavor is to write alone (mostly). Our enjoyment is to discuss what we do with others. Our salvation is to open our hearts to the ones that know our difficulties best.

HALLELEUA!

Thursday, April 21, 2005

From Chapter 25 of "Atlanta Nights"

"Richard didn't have as sweet a personality as Andrew but then few men did but he was very well-built. He had the shoulders of a water buffalo and the waist of a ferret. He was reddened by his many sporting activities which he managed to keep up within addition to his busy job as a stock broker, and that reminded Irene of safari hunters and virile construction workers which contracted quite sexily to his suit-and-tie demeanor.

Irene was considering coming onto him but he was older than Henry was when he died even though he hadn't died of natural causes but he was dead and Richard would die too someday. . ."

— from Chapter 25 of Atlanta Nights

Acceptance Letter from PublishAmerica for "Atlanta Nights"

----- Original Message -----
From: mailto:meg@publishamerica.com PublishAmerica Aquisitions [meg@publishamerica.com]
To: mailto:xxx@xxx.com
Sent: Tuesday, December 07, 2004 12:53 PM
Subject: Atlanta Nights
Dear Mr.XXX:

As this is an important piece of email regarding your book, please read it completely from start to finish.

I am happy to inform you that PublishAmerica has decided to give "Atlanta Nights" the chance it deserves. An email will follow this one with the sample contract attached for your review. If you do not receive the email with the attached sample contract in twenty-four hours, please contact me, so I can resend the document via another method.

I will be happy to answer any questions you may have concerning the contract and to guide you through the contract negotiations phase. Please note that once you have requested that we send the official contract, we cannot further amend the contract.
Upon receiving your e-mail in acceptance with the terms, we will forward the final contract documents to you via regular mail for your signature. Along with your e-mail acceptance please include your legal name, current address, telephone number and title of work as you would like it to appear on the final contract.

The main terms of the contract are that we will pay you climbing royalties starting at 8%, you retain the copyright, and we will begin production on the book within 365 days of the date we receive the signed contract. A symbolic $1 advance underlines that all financial risk is carried by the Publisher, as we firmly
believe it should be.

Once the signed contract has been processed in our offices, you will be contacted by our Production department regarding "the next step" for your book in the publishing process.

After both parties have signed the contract, you will be contacted by our production department with a list
of questions and suggestions. Please feel free to e-mail any concerns or questions dealing with the terms of the contract to meg@publishamerica.com. Also, please visit our web site at
http://www.publishamerica.com/.

Welcome to PublishAmerica, and congratulations on what promises to be an exciting time ahead.

Sincerely,
Meg Phillips
Acquisitions Editor
PublishAmerica

Wednesday, April 20, 2005

Science Fiction Romance Online

Check out this site. It has lots of useful information.
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The SpecRom Online Article Archive

Speculative Romance Online wants to help you transform the speculative romance in your imagination to the speculative romance that sells. Check out the What's New list (left), or browse by category:

Write Well 16 ARTICLES
SpecRom's beyond-the-basics authorship collection.

Write-A-World 12 ARTICLES
Advice on creating memorable speculative settings.

The Casting Couch 10 ARTICLES
Techniques to create your corps du coeur.

Featured Creatures 8 ARTICLES
A guide to creating vampires and more.

Screws & Bolts 4 ARTICLES
Suggestions on writing the sensual and erotic.

Jumping the Hyphen 4 ARTICLES
Directions for navigating the cross-genre worlds.

Romancing the Racket 5 ARTICLES
News and views on all facets of the writing biz. AKA tennis for perverts

Can I Still Be An Accountant? 9 ARTICLES
Living the writing life.

Mixed Media 29 ARTICLES
Speculative Romance in Movies, TV and more!

Miscellany 12 ARTICLES
A host of good information that defies categorization.


Thursday, April 14, 2005

CNN.com - Police:�Woman sold daughter for car - Apr 13, 2005

You can't make this stuff up . . .

Police: Woman sold daughter for car

Second daughter allegedly forced into prostitution

Wednesday, April 13, 2005 Posted: 8:07 AM EDT (1207 GMT)


OKEECHOBEE, Florida (AP) -- A woman was arrested for allegedly forcing her 12-year-old daughter into prostitution and trading a 14-year-old daughter for a car.

The 39-year-old woman was charged with aggravated child abuse and sexual performance by a child. Both girls have been turned over to the Department of Children & Families.

The youngest girl and her mother were living out of their car, and would sell sex for food and an occasional shower at the men's homes, according to a report by Okeechobee County Sheriff's Detective K.J. Ammons.

The youngest daughter is three months pregnant, the report said; she was 11 when her mother first forced her to have sex with a man. The older daughter refused to be a prostitute and was allegedly sold for a car.

"She was sold to a man for a Mercury Cougar," Ammons said. "But he never gave the mother the vehicle." He was arrested in the case.

The youngest girl told detectives her mother took them out of school. "She said she was a good student and made A's and B's, and all she wants to do is go back to school," he said

Wednesday, April 13, 2005

Flogging The Quill

This is such a great site on editing. Many writers' samples are posted before they are edited and then afterwards. You really get a great understanding of what to keep and toss out.
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Thoughts on how to know if your story is happening

I'm enjoying immensely The Modern Library Writer's Workshop, by Stephen Koch, a noted teacher and author. One of the reasons I enjoy it is that he talks about storytelling in ways that resonate with the way I approach it.

One point that sparked for me is that we (the authors) haven't actually told our stories until someone reads them. Koch writes,

"To be sure, the reader follows the writer's lead; but only the reader's imagination, collaborating with the writer's, can make anything happen on any page. It's the reader who visualizes the characters, the reader who feels and finds the forward movement of the story, the reader who catches and is caught in the swirls of suspense, rides the flow of meaning, and unfolds the whole kaleidoscope of perception."

Our readers can do that, must do that, to experience our stories. Or, rather, their version of our stories. Each reader will add shades to the meanings of words and expressions and actions. They'll never read the story we've imagined.

Study: Little-Known Publishers Profitable

Study: Little-Known Publishers Profitable
Wed Apr 6, 2:04 PM ET
By HILLEL ITALIE, AP National Writer

NEW YORK - Unless you live in Boys Town, Neb., or work in education or family services, you likely haven't heard of Boys Town Press, the publishing arm of the youth care organization founded by Father Flanagan and made famous by the Spencer Tracy movie.

Boys Town Press, an 11-year-old company that publishes parenting and educational materials, generated sales of $1.7 million last year, a fraction of what Random House, Inc., Scholastic, Inc., and other billion-dollar companies bring in.

Boys Town may appear an industry exception, but a new study says it's more the rule. In a report issued Wednesday, the Book Industry Study Group says there are thousands of such publishers, earning between $1 million and $50 million on their own, but adding up to an estimated $11 billion market.

"For several years, we knew there was a segment of book industry activity that was not being covered by traditional research," said Jeff Abraham, executive director of the study group, a nonprofit research and policy organization funded by publishers, booksellers and others in the industry.

Abraham said that traditional studies released by the study group, the Association of American Publishers and others assume that the solid majority of book sales comes from the larger organizations, with the top 50 making at least $20 billion out of a $28 billion market. Wednesday's report, titled "Under the Radar," asserts that the industry is both larger and less concentrated than previously believed.

"We've been seeing signs for a long time, especially with the rise of the internet," said Kent Sturgis, president of the Publishers Marketing Association, which represents thousands of independent publishers. "It used to be New York publishers were gatekeepers of what got into print. Technology has democratized book publishing."

Abraham acknowledged that one problem for his organization was finding out just how many publishers are out there. The study group worked with R.R. Bowker, which compiles industry statistics, and sent inquiries to more than 85,000 companies. Around 3,200 responded, Abraham said, allowing the study group to make projections with a high level of confidence.
The report was prepared by InfoTrends/CAP Ventures, a market research and strategic consulting firm.

Like Boys Town, "under the radar" publishers sell to specialized audiences and rely at least partly on outlets besides bookstore. Boys Town, for example, sells mostly through its Web site and direct mail marketing.

In White River Junction, Vt., Margo Baldwin runs Chelsea Green Publishers, a 20-year old company that focuses on environmental and political titles. Baldwin's books sell in stores and through local political organizations. Chelsea Green generated $3.7 million last year, and even published a best seller, George Lakoff's "Don't Think of an Elephant."
Baldwin credits the rise of Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble.com with helping publishing houses such as hers.

"The online retailers have significantly altered the industry because they allow small publishers to have their books alongside the books by the big publishers, at least in a virtual retail slot," she said. "Before that, if you couldn't get into a traditional store, you had no distribution channel."
Another publisher, Burt Levy, is a race car driver who in 1994 self-published a novel about the sport, "The Last Open Road," taking out a second mortgage to cover costs. Levy was eventually signed by St. Martin's Press, but said the book never reached the race car fans he was convinced would buy it. Instead, "Open Road" was stocked with general fiction, "between Doris Lessing and Sinclair Lewis."

So Levy bought back the rights to "Open Road" and for his next novel, "Montezuma's Ferrari." He returned to self-publishing, selling his book at racing events and car museum gift shops. He now has written a trilogy of racing novels, with total sales just above $1 million.
"We never did do as well in bookstores, as we did in the niche markets," said Levy, who is based in Oak Park, Ill.

"I'm not surprised to learn that there are so many publishers like me. I think the key is that some books fit into areas that the big publishers just don't get to. In the end, you just need to do what you're good at."
___

Sunday, April 03, 2005

Pros offer tips on landing a literary agent

This is a follow up to Shawn's post. A must read article on landing a literary agent. We all know it's possible because Shawn landed one. Only after a book is polished is the time to submit. We should look at Shawn as an example. When she submitted "All My Tomorrows" before it was really in tip top shape, it took her six months or longer to find an agent, who turned out to be too green. We all know Shawn's been revising that book, and in the mean time, submitted "My Highland Love," which took her far less time in order to snare an agent and an excellent one at that. This is how we learn. Take the experience and run with it.
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By Cathie Beck, Special To The News February 6, 2004

So here it is, already February, and even though you finally wrapped up that labor of love and hate - your book - you're stuck fast in the thinking stages of sending it to literary agents.
Though you swore you'd do it just as soon as that ball dropped on Times Square New Year's Eve, the truth is: You're just one of god-knows-how-many thousands of writers yet to crack the book-publishing code. And besides, without an "in," no powerful agent would ever talk to you, let alone read your book - right?

Wrong, says "Seven-Figure Molly."

That's Molly Friedrich of the New York Aaron Priest Literary Agency, an agent who represents Frank McCourt (Angela's Ashes) and Jane Smiley (Moo), among other prominent authors.
"It's such a myth that access to agents is difficult," she says. "It's just not true. I'm easy to get to. If anyone writes a thoughtful, intelligent query letter, I'd probably phone her. Any agent would. Here's another thing: Anybody good will get published."

So how does an unknown get the attention of the desired agent? How can you land that exacting, successful representative who falls madly in love with your work, exhaustively pitches it and strikes the dream deal for your novel, your how-to book, your memoir?
It's not as tough as you might think.

We polled more than two-dozen agents, and they agree with Friedrich: With some diligent homework and the perfect query letter, you're bound to catch someone's eye eventually.
Today, for procrastinators everywhere, a few insider tips from the pros:

• Know your agent before writing a query letter.

"Authors should be doing their homework," says Sandra Dijkstra, who has been hailed by the Los Angeles Times as "the most powerful literary agent on the West Coast."

"Before they write the letter to us, they should check the acknowledgment pages of similar works to theirs. Look in the books you love and compare them to your book - who is the agent being acknowledged?"

Choose an agent who has represented similar works in the past.
Richard Pine, of Arthur Pine Associates Inc. in New York, takes Dijkstra's recommendations up a notch.

Pine represents some of the highest-profile authors today, including spiritual guru Wayne W. Dyer and The South Beach Diet author Arthur Agatston. He suggests that authors get to know personal, as well as professional, details about any agent they're considering.

"There are a lot of agents out there," he says. "So it's the author's job to figure out who these people are. Do research. . . .

"Agents have special interests based upon where they grew up," he adds, "where they went to school, what they do in their free time, who they know, where they travel, and the most obvious, what kinds of books they represent. Then, if you have a sci-fi novel, you won't work really hard on getting an agent who doesn't represent science-fiction," says Pine.

" . . . You have to approach agents in a way that's interesting to the agent."

• Be succinct

Big-time agents receive hundreds of queries a week. Don't waste their time.
It's all about delivering a one-page, three-paragraph, magical piece of paper. Agents note that the first paragraph should compellingly distill your book; the second, explain how your book is distinctive; and the third, wrap everything up in a way that convinces the agent that no one but you can write this book.

Ted Weinstein, former music critic for National Public Radio's All Things Considered and owner of Ted Weinstein Literary Management in San Francisco, notes: "There's a scene in a movie where the guy says, 'You had me at hello.' I've represented an author simply because her one-page query caught me just like that line from the movie."

Quit while you're ahead. Keep it short.

• Don't sound cocky.

Being confident is one thing. Believing you're of literary-classic caliber is quite another.
"I once got a letter that said, 'I think James Joyce writes a lot like me,' " recalls Suzanne Gluck, co-head of the William Morris Literary Agency's worldwide literary department.
Gluck chuckles even now at the recollection.

"Believe me," she says, "that sort of claim creates an office giggle for the rest of the day. . . .

"It's difficult to take seriously the writer who makes inappropriate comparisons of their work to contemporary and classic literature - who over-reach."

• Prove you're not a novice.

"I can tell in the first 100 words whether a writer can write," says Pine. "So your query cannot sound impersonal, amateurish or ill-prepared. I can't tell you the number of times people have written to me and said something like, 'I've written a fictional novel.' I know that person is not for me. Write a smart personal letter."

• Show respect - for an agent's time and intelligence.

"I don't like people to show up my office and just want to meet me. You have to wait your turn," says literary agent Elyse Cheney, who works with Sanford J. Greenburger Associates in New York. "I also don't like queries that have gimmicks going on."

Cheney recalls one writer who sent an umbrella with the query, because the book's opening scene took place in the rain. "That doesn't work," Cheney says.

In addition, "A lot of people start a query with questions that are supposed to be provocative. It's coy and uninteresting and trumped-up when a writer starts a query with questions like, 'Have you ever . . . ?' or 'What do you think it would feel like . . . ?' What the writer is doing is pumping up (their query) with the hopes that it will make what they're saying more interesting, but they don't need to do that. Just tell me what (the book) is (about)."

• Don't make technical mistakes.

Agents possess myriad idiosyncratic preferences - and expect you to follow them.
Research agents' Web sites and learn the details of contacting them - whether to use surface or e-mail, etc. Such particulars are often outlined under "submissions" on their sites.

Admonishes Cheney: "I really don't like e-mail queries at all. I want to receive them by (snail) mail, but everyone sends e-mails anyway. Check the agency's Web site," she says.

• Read.

"What really annoys me," says Cheney, "is that everyone wants to write a book, but they don't read.

"I remember a story someone once told me: 'A doctor sits down next to a man. When the doctor learns the man is a writer, the doc says, "Hey, I always wanted to write a book. I think I will." The writer says back, "Yeah, I always wanted to perform brain surgery. I think I'll try it." '

"That sort of illustrates the point: It's impossible to write books if you're not a devoted reader of good books."

• Nurture any possible connections.

"It's helpful to have been recommended to us," admits Dijkstra, though she stresses that a good query letter can be just as powerful.

Adds Weinstein, "I tell authors to attend a lot of writers conferences. It's like speed dating with agents - you get to pitch the agents and see if they want to see your proposal."

• Don't lose hope.

There's plenty of room for the writer who takes the query letter seriously, says Dijkstra. So there's no time like the present to start taking your New Year's resolution seriously.

"We read everything that comes in," says the agent - a comment that should encourage even the most reticent of writers. "And we read it with great care.

Cathie Beck is a Denver short story writer and journalist. She is currently shopping her own manuscript, "Cheap Cabernet," to agents.

Friday, April 01, 2005

Character Building Workshop - Writers' Village University

Character Building Workshop
Your story people will never be the same.

Thursday, March 31, 2005

Web Mystery Magazine Spring 2005, Volume II, issue 4

Welcome to Spring 2005: Volume II, Issue 4

Web Mystery Magazine is extremely proud to present this issue, featuring non-fiction articles and columns by experts in a variety of fields, from forensics to private investigations to historical fiction to pulp fiction history, as well as original short mystery fiction by writers both established and new.

Bookmouth.com

Simple Things You Can Do To Get The Word Out
About Your Independent Project

Tuesday, March 29, 2005

The Internet Review of Science Fiction

The Internet Review of Science Fiction is a forum for the serious exploration of the literature of the fantastic. IROSF publishes intelligent articles, essays, interviews, reviews, and criticism to illuminate the most interesting and important work in the genres of science fiction and fantasy.

WritersServices 2004

This is a great website for writers.

Foetry Speaks!

This Week’s Column:

FOETRY SPEAKS!

... a MobyLives guest column

by Anonymous


Editor's note: Recent news items in the MobyLives news digest about the website Foetry.com, and its accusations that certain literary prize competitions are corrupt, have generated some of the most heated mail this site has ever received. Remarkably, most of that mail—even the majority that applauded Foetry—was, by request, off the record.

Seeking light amidst the heat, MobyLives has asked Foetry.com to explain itself, and in particular to address concerns about the anonymity of whomever is behind it. Foetry agreed . . . on the condition of anonymity. While MobyLives does not favor the use of anonymous sources, there are times when, because of threat to the source, they are justified. The proprietor of Foetry.com satisfied the proprietor of MobyLives that this was such a case.

28 March 2005 — According to Whitman, "The maker of poems settles justice, reality, immortality." How will the poets writing and publishing today be remembered?

Foetry.com launched on April 1st of 2004 to expose the status quo in American poetry publication: many books published are winners of contests that are often large–scale fraud operations. Judges select their friends, students, and lovers from pools of manuscripts numbering in the hundreds or thousands, accompanied by an entry fee, usually around $20–$25. Some of the competitions are sponsored by university presses, such as the Iowa Poetry Prize and the University of Georgia Contemporary Poetry Series.

As soon as Foetry.com was launched, the defenses began. "What if the manuscript really was the best one?" "This is how it's always been." "You should spend less time whining and more time writing." "You're just bitter that you didn't win."

We hear the same arguments regularly and none are convincing. When is it ever acceptable to cheat? Have we really come to the point that universities sponsor "open" competitions that are funded by thousands of hopeful victims? When Jorie Graham, a Harvard professor, selects the manuscript of her own husband and colleague, Peter Sacks, out of hundreds of entries, why are people angry at us instead of them? Does academic integrity apply only to students and not to professors?

When these poets publish their "winning" books, more awards, readings, and teaching posts follow. The judges bestow prizes to the writing they helped to shape, that they influenced, in contests subsidized by entrants on a crooked playing field. In an exchange on "Ambition and Greatness" in a recent issue of the journal Poetry, Daisy Fried says, " . . . when the only aim is getting an A+ in reproducing teachers' revolutions, it's unlikely to lead anywhere but mediocrity."

Any judge can easily recognize the writing of poets they have taught, or work they know intimately, in a blind reading; removing the names from manuscripts is not enough. It's a poor excuse and every good reader knows that. Contests must prohibit entries from poets where a conflict of interest is a possibility. Screeners and judges must recuse themselves when writing is recognized as that of a personal associate.

Foetry.com is under attack by two groups of people. One is the poets who have benefited from the unscrupulous behaviors we discuss, and their defensive friends. The second is made up of those who hope to advance their writing by defending illicit activities; after all, one day it may happen for them — if their poetry cannot stand on merit, perhaps it will be affirmed through connections at the right cocktail party or by sucking up this week at the Associated Writing Programs annual conference.

In addition to our webpages that detail the illicit — some say illegal — selections of various contests, and the judges who made the choices, Foetry.com provides a discussion forum area. Most of the more than eight hundred members of the forum are anonymous, as are the site administrators. We are tired of the people who use that as a way to discredit what we are doing. Their hope is that people will forget the real issue if they say we are cowards, or that they have no way to defend themselves. The people complaining about anonymity are the ones who have something to hide. Do we refuse to read every article in the newspaper that quotes a source speaking on condition of anonymity?

Lately, it has become clear why anonymity is important. Our forum includes stories of blacklisting by Brown University professors. A website called Whoisfoetry divulges the "true" identities of some of our site members and solicits tips for our outing. The University of Georgia released the name of the person who requested records of the judges and their selections on our behalf. Recently, through insinuation, another forum member has been victimized on a professor's personal website as retaliation for our work, though he was not involved; in fact, he had not even posted on our site. He has been victimized by foets on grant panels before and was recently threatened again.

We are not afraid; our work is just beginning. Some presses have adopted the so–called Jorie Graham rule, a moniker created because the Macarthur genius and Pulitzer winner has chosen her students and lovers as "prizewinning poets" so many times. In general, the rule says no friends or former students of the judge are eligible, but even with that important guideline in place, some publishers are violating their own rules. The University of Georgia finally added a statement of Academic Integrity to the contest page, and soon after announced winners of the latest round. One, Susan Maxwell, is a current student in the PhD program at the University of Denver, where series editor for the George prize, Bin Ramke, teaches. Every party should be ashamed, from Georgia, which allowed that to happen again, to Bin Ramke, to Susan Maxwell, whose work is affirmed only through fraud.

One of our Foetry Forum regulars, Vermeer expresses the frustrations of our visitors:

I know the poets I love (Neruda, Blas de Otero, Lorca, Angel Gonzalez, Brodsky, Bei Dao, Yannis Ritsos, Vasko Popa, Nâzim Hikmet) have always seemed heroic to me. They stood up to political regimes. They wrote when their lives were threatened. Lorca was dragged into an olive grove and assassinated. Ritsos and Hikmet were thrown in prison. But they continued to stand up against the oppressors, the thieves of liberty and freedom of expression. And they helped change the world to be a better place, they confronted the word and created art that transformed. And here in America the brave writers of the MFA programs and non–MFA programs can't get a little backbone and stand up and say enough is enough with these rigged contests and self dealing awards? Stop this pathetic self–dealing and stealing? STOP STEALING! It is utterly outrageous and pathetic. We can't do that?

That is what we want. If the contests are to continue, if taxpayers are to support the National Endowment for the Arts, which funds many of the sham presses, then we insist that people stop stealing. We are watching.



This commentary was written by the editor of Foetry.com who wished to remain anonymous.


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