Novel 1, College Basketball 0

Nathan Bransford, highly seeded in the Most Awesome Agent on the Web brackets, is offering a query critique (or a book from one of his authors, but I doubt most of us are thinking of THAT prize) to whoever wins his NCAA competition. I’m not in the running, as some pod person took over my brain when I was considering the relative merits of Connecticut vs Texas A&M, but it’s still good fun. If Cal-Stanford end up in a showdown in the women’s tourney I’ll offer a side bet.

(Don’t get me started on how the men’s competition is the default, needing no qualifier, but the women’s is the WOMEN’S tournament.)

Just finished (except for going over to smooth out the prose) the complete rewrite of chapter 1, a procedure which spiked 2000 words of excellent (if I do say so myself) character development and backstory.  But it was dragging down the momentum, and now that I’ve streamlined to one POV character, I should have room for some backstory tidbits further along the way.  I’m finding Donald Maass’s Writing the Breakout Novel workbook immeasurably helpful in the ‘need more tools in the workbox’ kind of way, and the ‘combining characters’ strategy is already looking quite promising.  The problem with writing a novel populated by historical people is that you – well, I – can’t simply ditch characters who were definitely there, but at least I can make them do double duty.

Thundercat is sitting on my lap, occasionally licking my hand in that ‘I am SO starving that I am going to eat your fingers!!!!’ kind of way, so I’d better stave off immediate disaster.

Be careful who you ask for blurbs

Sometimes book publication goes very, very bad.

In preparation for the publication of her debut novel The Jewel of Medina, Sherry Jones suggested a few people who might be interested in writing cover blurbs. (The kind that praise the book with lots of adjectives, i.e. ‘Magnificent!’ – Thundercat.) Her novel, about the Prophet Mohammed’s young bride, was scheduled to be published by Random House next week. One of those potential blurbers, an academic named Denise Spellberg, had a lot of concerns about the novel, and her comments triggered (sorry, the puns just creep in) a complex reaction which led to the book being spiked.

(Ironically, just as I was typing that paragraph, my Brenda-Novak-agent response came back with a few fundamental comments – one of which was, might my novel prove unpublishable on the grounds of controversy? And guess what news story the agent pointed me to. We write in the zeitgeist.)

(I don’t think Nazis prompt the same type of controversy, but that’s another entry.)

I hate that a publishing house made the decision to cancel a book because someone might get offended. Here’s one of the big problems: you cannot actually predict in advance what is going to annoy someone, or when it will annoy them. The Danish political cartoons that sparked protests were, in some countries, published without any notable protest; looking at the Wikipedia timeline, I’m genuinely amazed at how many countries published these cartoons, without reprisals from anyone. Hell, a Danish newspaper later reprinted one, and that doesn’t seem to have resparked outrage.

I’m not denying that people died as a direct result from this situation, but I’m worried that Random House jumped straight from ‘this academic said thus-and-such’ to ‘death and reprisals’ without due consideration. [I am not, of course, privy to their decision-making process. But I note that they took less than a day to decide 'to possibly postpone publication' and three weeks to end it completely. Oh, sorry, 'indefinitely postpone.']

[I also note that Spellberg and her attorney claimed they 'would sue the publisher if her name was associated with the novel.' Go punch her name into a search engine. Yeah. These things rarely work out the way you want them to.]

To quote the late (alas) columnist Martyn Harris, on the Salman Rushdie fatwa, ‘There is more devastating critique of the divine inspiration of the Koran in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, and no one is burning that.’ There is some selectivity here, and clearly not everyone agrees that there is a particular response required for what may be interpreted as unfair criticism. I wouldn’t be surprised if Jones’s book received some annoyed e-mails, maybe even a copy or two burned. Heck, maybe it would be a bigger controversy than Danish cartoons + Satanic Verses combined. But what are the chances of that happening? Doesn’t matter – Random House is pulling up the pegs and going home.

What really bugs me about the process detailed in the WSJ article is that someone had a problem with the book – though why a love scene between two people known to have been married should be a ‘delibrate misinterpretation of history’ I can’t figure out, but again, I don’t have all the information (and haven’t read the book, and probably won’t now) – and e-mailed another person, who then posted on their blog about it, and then someone ELSE came up with a seven-point plan to kill the publication and demanded that the author ‘apologise all [sic] the muslims [sic] across the world.’ Note the point at which we move from a perfectly legitimate critique of a book (which Spellberg discusses here) to a decision that every person of a particular religion in the entire world deserves an apology.

Okay, at this point I’ve lost any semblance of a point, and you can probably drive trucks through my logic. I’m stopping here.

Writing a novel about the Third Reich suddenly looks like a much safer proposition than it did when I began this entry. But who knows? – maybe Random House would take on my book and then decide that some wacko neo-Nazi might decide to spray the offices with an MP40.

I feel so sorry for Jones.

Okay, I’m not done yet. If Random House were so concerned about stirring up Mohammed-related controversy, why the hell didn’t someone weigh in on this before the author was preparing for her eight-city book tour? Heck, I had one chapter and a synopsis read by a single agent, and she’s warning me about the ramifications of publishing this.

One chapter. A three-page synopsis (which I don’t think was even very good). And yet this is sufficient for me to receive a warning about controversy concerning a group that no longer exists and who are, among right-thinking people, known to be Bad And Wrong.

And we’re expected to believe that Jones’s agent, editor, copyeditor, cover artist, back-cover-description-writer – okay, scratch the last; they NEVER get the book right – basically, everyone involved in this book failed to consider the possibility of controversy? No one thinks about fatwas and bomb threats until they’re mentioned by an associate professor?

Clearly Spellberg wielded far more power than she thought.

If Random House really is concerned with the bottom line of ‘corporate interests’ (as Spellberg states), maybe they ought to worry about those interests long, long before they send the book out for review.

Gmail, you aren’t helping

So after several days of online mahjongg hard work, I finally have my partial ready to submit to the agent whose expert consideration I won in the Brenda Novak auction.

(I also have the smell of smoke in my hair. Seriously, how the heck did I burn a bagel so badly in the microwave that wreaths of smoke poured out?)

So I e-mailed the partial to The Agent and copied it to my gmail account. Upon reviewing it – noting with grumpiness that my e-mail client broke all the lines badly, but at least the actual submission looks as though it went through properly – I found that Gmail had seized upon the key words in the e-mail and provided helpful suggestions in the sidebar ads. To wit [URLs suppressed]:

- You should write a book. [Ghostwriter]
- Writing a Book? [Website]
- Non-Fiction Book Agency.
- Want to Self Publish?
- Publish Your Book Today.

With that last one, I don’t even NEED an agent! Gosh, how ironic.

Polyphony is hard!

Otherwise known as, multiple characters can be really confusing.

I regret having to ditch some, but when I went through three chapters and removed all but two characters, I found that I only needed to rewrite one scene to keep the plot moving – in other words, out of 2500 deleted words, I only had one necessary scene. There were a few observations I want to work back in, but that should be easy enough to do in dialogue format. It’s always a wake-up call when you cut things and the novel doesn’t suffer for it – and in fact, improves, as you clear out the underbrush. Phyllis Eisenstein once mentioned something about having deleted some thousands of words, then joining the two ends together and finding they came together seamlessly.

My theory is that if I reread it and don’t notice anything’s missing, then it really doesn’t need to be there.

So I’m effectively left with two narrative voices, emphasis on voices, because if they sound alike there’s no point in splitting it at all, and I still feel that’s where the book needs to go.

Meanwhile, getting critical responses to my first chapter has been an eye-opener, not least of which in the sense of ‘everyone’s going to think differently.’ One reader had primarily minor suggestions with some advice about structure, one felt the writing was good but that major structural changes are required, and one – well, ‘they misread the draft!’ sounds like a knee-jerk response, but I can’t think of any other way to interpret the most important part of the feedback. The reader’s belief that the book is fatally flawed and unpublishable (even by a small press) seems to be based on the assumption that the character flaws in the opening chapter are continued all the way through the end of the novel. I didn’t include a synopsis, which (hopefully) would have clarified things. It’s a reminder to me to make the reader aware that the character – who’s a young Nazi – is capable of breaking out of that mindset, and to weave that in from the beginning, because I don’t want the reader to think ‘this is all played out on a single emotional level,’ but I refuse to believe the book is unpublishable.

Well, my next reader is an agent rather than an author, so it will be interesting to see which of the readers they agree with – or, more likely, they’ll have yet another response….

Have some more links

Sorry, it’s still a bit content-free around here, what with the travel and the trying to get things done while I have some spare time. Have a few interesting links:

Jennifer Jackson of the Donald Maass Literary Agency asks whether authors and agents can prevent mismatches before they ever join forces. Note that this is more sophisticated than announcing ‘I want an agent who will sell my book for squillions, also the movie rights.’

Should politics have a place at the bookstore? Some say yes, some say no. But I really hope that during my time working in bookstores – which probably totals nearly half of my adult life, and all of that at independent bookshops – I avoided insulting any of the customers. I don’t have to agree with their political leanings, their choice of reading material, or their hairstyles, but it isn’t my place to critique them. That’s what blogs personal diaries are for. In any case, I did a political window one year and had a nice little three-party window display.

And finally, wow, if you want to know what the heck libraries do when they get archives handed over to them, you can read about how the British Library is dealing with Harold Pinter’s archive. My archive will probably end up in a recycling site, but it’s nice to know about people whose scribblings are deemed useful for literary scholarship.

Delayed entry

Oops, I meant to post this days weeks ago, and it got stuck as a draft. I am still traveling – the Library of Congress was a bit sloppily-run, but I got all my books so I was happy – so here it is now as a placeholder until I write something else:

I know this blog is rather turning into the Nathan Bransford lovefest but my goodness, the man is clever. His latest burst of genius is whether you have a plot.

I do, but you’d never have known it from my synopsis – or, rather, I’m sure the plot is there, but it’s been a bit buried.

The good thing is that I don’t think there will be too much work needed because it’s been there all along.

Something I learned way back in Astro 101 (or whatever the number was), in relation to why a certain star couldn’t be seen: it’s there but it just isn’t visible. I think this is true in life on many occasions.

No excuse!

Given the amount of time and effort some agents put into giving advice about query letters, it’s really the responsibility of Us Who Query to pay attention. Now, obviously, the details will vary between agencies – if they want pages, if they don’t like e-queries, whether it’s okay to write a single letter to the agency or query each agent individually – but the basic rules are consistent. Here are some links to good advice.

Nathan Bransford has an entire series of entries (‘The Essentials’), which you can find in the sidebar, but you can start with the basic query letter formula.

And he also came up with the query points system, which came out of the whole whether-you-can-break-the-rules discussion. Basically, you can break the rules if you’re Michael Chabon; otherwise, refrain from using purple ink.

Lucienne Diver has a useful list of query dos and don’ts, which includes the ever-useful ‘don’t try to get too cutesy with your queries’ – apparently plastic fish (!) were involved. Incredibly useful is her first statement: ‘The query letter is basically an introduction to the writer; the synopsis is the introduction to the story.’ I shall keep that in mind.

And Kristin Nelson has a multi-entry pitch workshop.

Now, everyone will still make mistakes, but really, there is enough information out there – in these blogs and others – to prevent you from making the egregious ones that get your query deleted before the agent even reaches the ‘I look forward to hearing from you’ part.

Link soup for writers

Too much work – both the writing kind and, alas, the ‘keeping-body-and-soul-together’ 9-to-5 slog – to think of anything interesting, so have some links.

Celebs who write children’s books. No analysis here, just a list. Are any of these books any good? Any readers who have children who wish to be guinea pigs? Let me know in a comment.

Alanis Morissette’s writing is apparently an outlet for her anger. Um, and ‘You Oughta Know’ was a tender reminiscence?

One of those stories about a writer who didn’t have to query 1000000 agents before getting signed. But Stephanie Kuehnert only had to give pages to one, so that frees up the other 999999 for the rest of us. (Why the story’s lead talks about publishers, I don’t know.) Why isn’t the agent named, I wonder? The Caren Johnson Literary Agency sounds perfectly respectable.

And, finally, lots of expensive computer programs that claim to help you write your novel more easily. Look, I’m just happy that I don’t have to squint at the mistyped ‘teh’ while dabbing at it with a Liquid Paper brush. I think the brand name ‘StoryMill’ says it all.

Brenda Novak auction almost at an end

The fantastic auction run by writer Brenda Novak ends today, and there are still plenty of items you can get for reasonable prices, and she somehow managed to run a raffle without running afoul of gambling laws, so you can buy raffle tickets ($20) for the next couple of days. The raffle for writers includes an edit of 30 pages, a proposal read by an agent, AND a proposal read by an editor, so theoretically it’s a publication package! Or at least a good few steps down the publication road.

I already picked up a couple of things – a proposal review by an author, and another by an agent – at less than I expected to pay for them, which means that I’m still well under budget for tonight’s finale. Alas, I will not be bidding on either the Donald Maass proposal read (currently at $1014) or the Evil Editor full manuscript read (currently at $3900), nor did I have a shot at the Kristin Nelson proposal read (closed at $1050). But I do have my eye on a few auctions.

In one sense, it’s a bit scary how much money people will pay, but if you look at this as an investment in your career, then $1000+ isn’t all that much. A professional editor who isn’t in the publishing business is going to charge a couple hundred bucks to review part of a manuscript, and that’s not going to include industry knowledge.

Of course, it’s not always clear how much feedback one will receive. Kristin Nelson said over on her blog that her read-and-response will be as in-depth as anything she does for her clients. I don’t know if that holds true across the board (or, more specifically, for the agent whose response I won), but even a decent general response would be a huge help to me.

Or make me dump the project in a fit of pique, whatever.

If you haven’t taken a look yet, please head on over. At the very least, you could buy a raffle ticket!

Rules lawyering, agent edition

Alas, I wasn’t one of the five finalists in the Nathan Bransford 250-words-of-dialogue competition. (I wasn’t even in the top seven, as he said the two runner-up entries were previous contest winners.) My entry wasn’t perfect; after I submitted it, I cringed when I realized that I made the speaker use the word ‘flat’ instead of ‘apartment’ even though she clearly didn’t know British terminology. But exercises on such a small scale are incredibly useful – and who knows, maybe next time I will win!

One of the contest rules caused some controversy – namely, the fact that the entries were supposed to be 250 words, but many entrants (and at least one finalist) exceeded that limit – and this got me thinking about rules in general, with regard to submitting to agents.

I want to make it clear that nothing I am about to say is a criticism of Mr. Bransford, his competition, or his decisions. He is undeniably awesome for being willing to spend more than a working day’s worth of time on this and to donate even more time to the finalists/winner. If he chooses to set or break rules for his own contest, that’s his decision. (Especially given that he pointed out that said rules ‘may be amended with zesty randomness and are subject to my own interpretations and opinions, which are known to be both feckless and strongly held.’ Hard to get more zesty than that.)

I mean, if you follow a religion, there are rules to follow, but it would be pretty weird to argue that God is mandated to follow his own sacraments.

(NB I am not comparing Nathan Bransford to God.)

(Although if doing so means he’ll represent me….)

Anyway, the point of this entry: rules, and should we follow them with regard to querying agents? (I need to keep it limited or else it will get into the ‘committing murder versus parking on yellow lines’ arguments.)

One side of the argument goes: yes, absolutely. Agents, as has been noted elsewhere in this blog, receive hundreds of query letters a month. Each agency has slightly different requirements, and it is your responsibility to know them. You don’t want to be treated as a generic writer, and the agents don’t like being treated that way any more than you do, so don’t send out the equivalent of ‘Dear Author’ letters. (Unless that’s what the agency wants! – say, if queries are going to be passed around and given to whichever agent seems the best fit. Although it’s best to be sure; the Donald Maass agency will do this but you should still address the letter to Mr. Maass.)

If you send an attachment to the SuperBob Literary Agency when they said ‘no attachments,’ you’ll be lucky to get an auto-reject from their system, because that’s likely to be your only indication that they spiked your letter. It’s your responsibility to know and follow the rules, and the agency has no responsibility to read your query if you can’t be bothered to take the time to double-check.

Why should they care? Well, for a start, if you submit a picture book query when they explicitly say they don’t represent those, you are wasting their time. Moreover, if you cannot follow the simple instructions on how to submit a query letter (including taking the 0.4 seconds to double-check that you spelled the agent’s name right), why should they expect you to follow any other directions? How can they be sure you’ll make changes to your manuscript? Submit the final version on time? (‘Oh, well, they said May 1, but I’m going to take until June 13 and that’s fine.’) Turn up for interviews and photocalls? They’re thinking ahead, even if you aren’t. They want a client who is dependable.

‘BUT!’ I hear you wail. ‘It’s the quality of the writing that counts! I am a unique snowflake and my writing is brilliant. These pesky restrictions don’t REALLY matter. When the agent reads my brilliant writing she is hardly going to be hitting the word count button; she is going to be demanding a partial.’

I’m not going to deny that this happens occasionally. But when it doesn’t happen, you’ve just shot yourself in the partial. You’ve shut down the possibility of the agent accepting your work, because there are 400 other hopefuls clamoring in their inbox – and one of those 400 might have just as good a query AND be able to follow instructions.

Yes, there are people who succeed in spite – or because – of the fact that they color outside the lines. But how many people fail for those reasons? You never see them, do you, except as bitter anonymous commenters muttering in forums that the only way to make it in this business is to Know The Right People or Go To The Right MFA Program and how everyone is Against The Real Creative People And It’s A Conspiracy.

It isn’t a conspiracy. It’s you thinking you’re better than the rules and no one else believing it. Maybe you are – so prove you can jump through the hoops to get people to listen to you. THEN, when you are breaking the NYT bestseller list, you can do what you like, because you’ll have proved that you can bring in the money. (And given how some of the top authors seem to leave line editors by the wayside after book 5, I have no doubt that you will do what you like.)

Now, there are times when the rules are – by their very nature – a bit fluid. If you’re asked to paste the first five pages of the manuscript into our query letter, then that means five double-spaced pages. Not five single-spaced, not seven double-spaced. Obviously you have to use common sense – you shouldn’t cut off a sentence off mid-word simply because that where the five pages ends, and given that even standard 12-point fonts vary in spacing, no one is going to demand that you prove you didn’t include 5.3 pages. But they mean five pages for a reason.

(If you want to submit the last five pages of the chapter, say, because your first five pages aren’t compelling, you might need to revise them. That’s as much as any casual browser in a bookstore is going to give you, after all. Think of it as an exercise.)

Bottom line: following the agent’s rules means you can prove that you’re both a brilliant writer AND a solid professional. Isn’t that a reputation worth pursuing?