I mentioned yesterday, over at The Art of Procrastination that I spent my weekend wading through the slush-pile. And it's totes not all I did this weekend, mid-edits and two chapters from the end of a book, but it was a large part of it. 

I try not to be insulting about the slush pile, in public anyway. I fail, pretty frequently, but that's another matter entirely. The fact of the matter is we've all been there, and it's a learning process. There are a lot of things I think most of us learn with experience, as we collect that folder of rejections and see what works and what doesn't. Still, I'm pretty sure we'd all like to skip a bit of that. So. Just for you, I've got a pithy ridiculous list of tips (because it's me, I don't know what else you expected).

1. Follow the bloody instructions!
Literally nothing as a reader is as annoying as having to wade through extra stuff you're not going to accept anyway. I know it seems cold, but if I've asked for something in a specific format it's for a reason and I don't have the time or the impetus to decide if you're special enough to be exempt from that. Nobody likes to be ignored, so don't set yourself up for failure by ignoring an editor's requests.

2. Nobody cares.
This one's a little cold too, but it's the truth. Unless you're submitting to a religious publication, I don't want to know about your relationship with whatever your deity of choice is. Unless I'm asking you for an anthology of poetry I don't want to know every place you've been published in the last six years. Unless it's immediately, inherently relevant to the thing you're sending me I don't care. If your cover letter rambles I'll probably skim it at best, and be less inclined to give your submission the kind of attention you'd like me to give it. 

3. Nobody's story is good enough to survive not having an ending.
I've touched on this before, but it bears repeating. A lot. We've gotten some clever, wonderful stories we'd have been happy to publish, until they took a short sharp turn to the left and went off the cliff. Look at your plot, and imagine you're telling your best friend this thing that happened to you in the coffee shop down the block. How many times would they hit you if you walked off where your story ends? Then for the love of all things fluffy, fix it before you send it out.

4. Develop a relationship.
There isn't a publisher out there who doesn't have a twitter account, and a facebook, and... ours included. Hunt them down. With an account with your name on it, because I sure remember that stuff, and I'm sure other people do too. Especially independent or small press publishers. Reply to their tweets, create a relationship, even if it's based around pithy Star Wars one-liners. Find out if they have a mailing list you can be put on. Make yourself a real entity, a person who could possibly be depended upon for content. It's a foot in the door that will cost you minimal effort and no money.

5. Look at the date.
Up there, in the corner, that you wrote when you finished your final draft? How long ago was it? If you haven't changed, demonstrably, as a fledgling writer in the last two years we're gonna have to talk. If you finished that story four years ago and you're still sending it out with that date on it we really have to talk. Unless your Steven King...No, scratch that. Even Steven King changes as the years go by. If it's more than two years old give it another draft before you send it and change the bloody date on the thing.

6. Shotguns are good for hunting, not submissions.
We got a submission for The Golden Fleece. To the wrong email address. I stared at it for a good two minutes, utterly poleaxed. Not only did you not bother to actually read our guidelines, you didn't even look at them. Your sending me a story when you don't know what you're sending it to. You don't know who you're sending it to. In what wacky parallel universe do you live where crap like that works? Do you offer short-term vacation visa's, because I'd like to go visit somewhere my stuff could be published because I scatter-shot all over someone's inbox. 

7. Know your market.
This should fit under that first tick up there, about reading the instructions, but apparently it's a separate thing. I don't understand people sometimes. It should be self-explanatory. Not "This journal is for unpaid dental assistants who like Anime. Gee, maybe they'd like my story about an old man coming to terms with his eventual slide into uselessness in the nursing home." Maybe they would, but probably not. If it's a publication for children your story needs to feature children--this is a strict rule, because small ones are less plastic with that whole suspension of disbelief thing. My seven year old still has to constantly check with me to make sure things are fiction--and for the teen market there's a little more play, but not much. There's not a teenager alive who thinks 40 year old dudes are cool. Unless they're Johnny Depp...and I'm not sure he's even still in his 40's so clearly he's a special case. 

8. Don't be a d-bag.
Yeah, this is another of those self-explanatory ones. Here's the thing. In a book, you can get away with having a truly despicable main or point of view character. Maybe. If you're really good. You can sort of...Stockholm Syndrome us into liking them for other reasons. I'm not saying it's a thing to aim for, because its damn hard to pull off, but it can happen. For a short story market you've got like 2 pages, tops, and arguably like 2 sentences to hook the reader. There's not time to convince me Jack is a really great guy to spite the fact he talks about women like Ian Flemming's more misogynistic cousin (I say this with the full understanding I'm judging Mr Flemming entirely by the existence of a character named Pussy Galore and not having ever read a Bond novel).

9. No, you can't have any more!
Do. Not. EVER. Ask. For. Critique. Ever. Ever ever ever. Like seriously, even if by some small miracle they've offered it before. You aren't Oliver, shuffling up to the table for another bowl. Or you certainly don't want to be. Aside from being seriously unprofessional, I promise with a small press they'll remember, and be seriously unlikely to consider future submissions you send them.

10. "We're drift compatible!"
Everybody tells you to find a crit group. I know. I know. But here's the thing. A crit group, or a couple of friends you're comfortable making a little circle with--even if it's a triangle--will do more for your writing than nearly anything, except possibly a decade of time and a published mentor. Not only are you likely to start learning the things you do wrong--and stop doing them--I promise learning to edit other people's work and give constructive critique will make your work immeasurably better. There are tricks for this, but that's a discussion for another day. The short version is find people you respect as creators, who understand what you need out of this relationship and are marginally willing to give it to you.

Alright, that's all I have for wisdom to impart, mes enfants. I bid you, go and create. Vite vite. 

I'm trying my hardest not to turn Well Written Wednesday into "This is everything that's wrong with the slush pile."

Because seriously, there is so much wrong with the slush pile.

Anyway. We're going to talk about Oath-breakers.  Yeah, alright, I get nobody likes a liar, but that's not precisely what I mean. I mean oath-breakers in fiction. When you sit down and write, when you tell me a story, you're making a promise. Maybe it's not blood on the dotted line, but it's still a promise. 

"Hey, you. This thing I'm telling/showing/sketching out for you, it'll have a beginning, a middle, and an end. It'll have a purpose as a story--maybe not a higher one, but whatevs, it'll still be a purpose--and it'll do all the things it's promising to do before you get to the end. We cool?"

Because when it doesn't do those things? There are whole lands of failure devoted to stories who fall down on those. The kind you need a sixteen-mule-team and a magical compass to navigate. Stay away from magical failure land, storytellers. Stay far far away. 

It's not hard, just actually freaking finish your story. Finish it the way it should finish, after you've begun. Finish it like it's the last story you're ever going to tell, and it should hold up to the light of the ages, eligible for reprint in the Ancient Gazette when we're winging our way toward Andromeda Prime in a thousand year's time. 

One of the joys of the internet is the fact I can be in two places at once.

Hopefully not so much in the creepy way displayed in the painting there.

For a few months now, on this blog I've been trying a rotation of theme days. Miscellaneous Monday, Well Written Wednesday, and Sci-Fi Friday. I fail about as often as I succeed. Ask any newspaper columnist ever about how not-simple repetitive content is.

But this week my themes line up, between this blog and The Art of Procrastination, so I'm cross posting. They will be as ships that pass in the night. Seriously, stop looking for ice-bergs, it'll be fine.

Yes, alright. I'm being lazy and trying to write four blog posts this week instead of  five. So what? Were you--amorphous internet people you--going to offer to write one of those for me?

Didn't think so.



Anyway, it's Wednesday and that means we talk about things that are well-written. Or not, as the case may be.

There's been a sudden increase of slush pile in my life lately. And I know what writers think and say about the dreaded Slush. Let me tell you about the Slush from the other side.

Golden Fleece Press isn't by any means my first experience with a slush-pile. I've had plenty of occasion in my life to read things that should never have seen the light of day. I once reviewed a romance novel that has forever become my yard-stick for fail on a level I can barely articulate. It was long, and awful, and shaped about eighty percent of my views on the usefulness of historical accuracy in entertainment.

There was another one that involved badly conceived time-travel and characters even biblical-level plague would have been too good an end for.

I once rather stupidly, in the annals of my life squiring writers, offered online assistance to literally anyone who wanted help with their novel plot. What followed was three hours of incomprehensible, werewolf-themed shenanigans I will never get back and I feel their absence keenly.

These are the worst cases. The hyperbole--great spaghetti monster in the sky do I wish it was--infused funnies. The truly bad. But we all have ideas that die on the vine, or that should die on the vine. Apparently there's a knack for learning which ones those are. I can sympathize with that, even if I'm doing it backwards and sideways over my rolled eyes because just why.

What I can't get, I refuse to get, are the misplaced submissions. Why would you relegate yourself to the slush needlessly? And also we said it was a journal for children. Have you met children? They're the little things we used to be before life taught us there were worse things than spinach and math homework. We wanted Bunnicula, not Pet Cemetery.

Alright. Rant over. Maybe later I'll spill into all the ways YA is the deadest vibrant market I've ever beheld.

Fingers crossed next week's round of slush will be from people who once held an affinity for celery-desiccating bunnies.

I have utterly no clue what I said I was going to do this month. I think it was said with the full understanding that if I hadn't mentioned Golden Fleece Press yet, it was already hovering in my work folder and therefor whatever I thought was going to happen was more or less slated for failure.

It's hard to say I failed last month, when I sit back and look at everything I actually did. Did I do the stuff I said I was going to do? Well...no. I'm pretty sure I did nearly none of it. 

Whatevs. It's a new month full of new beginnings. I opened a publishing company last week! Arguably with a crap-ton of help and the coolest business partner in the universe, but I digress.  So. Goals for this new month.

• Ignore the faintly horrifying number of blogs I am responsible for upkeep on and ACTUALLY DO THEM. I know, this one might be a little difficult. Still, moonbeams and stardust and all that jazz.
• Edits. For the thing that's my placeholder in this whirlwind snowball of doom. I have months, but given everything else I need months so...
• I am doing Camp Nano. Because you all know I am crazy and I said I wouldn't, but you all knew that was a lie. You did, come on, admit it. I'm writing content for projects to be announced later and I know for a fact at least one of them is going to be utterly unhelpful in the way that means a 25k word project decides to be ten books. So. I've got that to look forward to. 
• Plan out a blog tour. Because my professional life isn't full to the gills already.

Right. So. There's my July, mixed in with my birthday and my kid's birthday and two visits from my parents and one national holiday and...

I wonder if there's a floor on my attic. That seems like a legitimate place to hide.

And now I'm going to do those things in the reverse order (I'm strange, you'll probably get used to it)

I never wanted to be a writer. No, strike that.  I never wanted to be an author. The list of stories I started and never did anything with would take six years to go through. I always wrote, always imagined. To this day I put myself to sleep at night with some random story that's rattling around in my head. But that's all it was. A way to kill time when I didn't have anything else to entertain me. A way to escape.

I can tell you the exact moment that changed, but it's not when I started writing seriously.

High School Freshmen English was strange. Unlike all the middle school English classes we'd had, our new teacher expected something different out of us. We read books a lot of people say they didn't read until college (Inherit the Wind is still probably my favorite) and learned how to write an essay and understand a poem in iambic pentameter. And then she asked us to write. At least five pages, a real story with a beginning, middle, and end. If we wanted to make it fiction that was fine with her.

Most of the people in my class wrote about the big summer vacation they'd taken with their family when they were six, or last years karate championship, or how they felt when their child-hood dog died. None of that felt big enough for me, and she'd said we could write fiction. So I did, and it was more like ten pages instead of five, and by the end of that ten pages I'd been stranded in a snowbound car in winter all alone (I don't remember where my parents were) and rescued by a fireman I still saw every summer. When she talked to me about my paper she was horrified she'd never heard of this happening--it was a small town and secrets were hard to keep--and I stared at her blankly for a good minute of gushing before I managed a tentative 'you said fiction was alright'. And then somehow I was signed up for her Creative Writing class the next year.

I wasn't exactly a success at it. I didn't write poems that got published, or join the school newspaper. I didn't start attending poetry readings in the nearest city or shift all my life goals. Poetry meant something to me, and books meant something to me, and writing was fun. End of story.

Sometime I'll tell you about the moment I realized I could actually write a book.

So... About that new book. It's not mine, although their is one of those about three-quarters through the first draft that's kicking my butt today. It's The Cuckoos Calling by Robert Galbraith (who, if you happen to own internets and exist on social media you probably know is J K Rowling). I'm not far enough into it I can tell you what I think. It's brilliant so far, and I'm sure given it's her it'll be brilliant all the way through. And all of this despite, if A Casual Vacancy is anything to go by, how much I hate at least one of the characters. 

I'm not sure how I feel about her failed attempt at a pen name. Obviously I see the point. That sort of pressure's got to be spectacularly uncomfortable at the best of times. Like winning an Academy Award for your debut film. Where do you go after that? I can't help wondering certain things though. Did her publisher know? If they did and still didn't try and press the book more I can't imagine what they were thinking, and if they didn't they've got to be annoyed--as much as they can be once they've been handed a golden goose. 

I hope there are more books, and I hope they all turn out to be wonderful. I don't care what name she writes under, but I do sort of feel like I'd have rather found Robert Galbraith all on his own. Because privacy means something, even when it's unrealistic.

I signed a publication contract today.

--Cross posted from Tumblr

So, I'm going to sound like I'm whinging here because it's stupidly rainy today (Thank you Andrea) and I'm in that sort of mood where I've had two cups of coffee this morning and no food.

I'm tired of being in Limbo. It's not just the personal strangeness of what's going on with the hubs (see previous long-winded ridiculous blog post about health issues) or the fact that it's the last week of school before summer (HALP!) and what that's going to do to my ability to complete anything.

I said some things earlier, about big newsish things that are happening with The Writing. These things take time, and I understand that. And given the way the rest of my life runs I've sort of decided patience is my superpower. So I'm actually okay with all that. 

What I'm less okay with is this stupid, itchy nowhere feeling that's coming along with it. Like people 'in the know' asking me repeatedly if I've decided on a pen name yet (despite the name on this blog, I haven't). Like P.I.T.K (see above, aren't I clever?) asking where they'll be able to buy the book, and if I'm going to have a launch party, and when will the next book happen. Seriously. The next book. Because clearly someone wanting to publish a book means it's done-and-ready-for-consideration-as-the-next-great-american-masterpiece. 

Also, it's time for declaring June goals. Let me know when you're done laughing. I can wait. 

I'll save the pithy 'I suck at goal making but this month will be different' lines for next month. I'm doing Camp Nano in June because July will involve visiting Kansas and about twelve birthdays so just no. And I'd very much like to finish the third book in the contemporary paranormal series I started in April. 

I'll save all the issues with that for next week. Have to leave myself something to talk about.