More on Query Letters

Still a-novelling, so my blogging is minimal, but I thought I'd post link to some deconstructions of good query letters (query 1, query 2) posted some time ago by Nathan Bransford of Curtis Brown Ltd. both showing impressive examples of what a good query should look like. The more examples I see, the more I wonder how my first query landed me an agent. (thx to La Gringa)

Pop culture implosion

This pic from io9 has to be a sign of the apocalypse, or something.

Moving the Goalposts

Blogging is taking a back seat to the new novel (30K+ yea me!) And yes, I bumped up the total wordage of Valentine's Night, the spec novel I'm working on while waiting to hear back from Anne. Two reasons.

1. I have trouble writing short, and I don't feel I'm that close to the halfway point.
2. I can.

Another week, another asshat. . .

Presented for your consideration, U.S. District Judge Jeffrey White of California. Whose attitude toward the free flow of information on teh interwebz seems cribbed from North Korea. Apparently a swiss bank is somewhat miffed at Wikileaks.org a website organized by a bunch of journalists and other activists whose primary mission is to give an anonymous platform for publicizing documents showing governmental and corporate wrongdoing in situations where the "leaker" would suffer serious reprisals. (i.e. it targets a lot of nasty regimes that could, for instance, kill you for blabbing embarrassing facts.)

So what happens when lawyers working for the Swiss banking group Julius Baer, file for an injunction to suppress the site's publication of several documents posted on the site allegedly revealing the bank was involved with money laundering and tax evasion? Why, the judge issues a permanent injunction shutting down the whole effing site, with only a couple hours notice to the sites' owner.

Now, within a few hours, someone must have pointed out to Judge White that he was not, in fact, issuing internet rulings in mainland China, and his injunction might be viewed as a tad extreme, because the permanent injunction was clarified with a temporary injunction focusing only on the documents in question.

Way to uphold the bastion of freedom. Nice to know that any tin-pot regime and corporate scumbag can get a web-site sanitized just by filing suit in California.

(But actually not, since no one can take back electrons. The site is mirrored up the wazoo all over the world, meaning the injunction is pointless and ineffective in addition to being draconian.)

We just keep rolling along

Well my latest spec project is still rolling along quickly, quickly enough that if Anne continues being overworked at Bantam, I might get the whole thing done before I have to do any editorial revisions on Wolfbreed #1 (titles, I need titles). I started it a week and a half ago, and I have 23K words. The good news is, unlike Wolfbreed I do not anticipate going back and completely revising everything halfway in. (Of course, I just jinxed myself, as I didn't have any plans like that for Wolfbreed at this point.)

For those curious, I have returned to vampires. However this is going to be unrelated to the pair of Blood & Rust novels. I'm trying my hand at an intentional paranormal romance. One that kicks most of the late 20th Century's contribution to the vampire mythos to the curb. No blood-drinking cabals conspiring in the darkness, no angsty goth heroes, and no supernatural vampire hunters of whatever dynasty.

Holy acid flashback, Batman!

No, I can't explain it. (blame the Smart Bitches)

If that didn't weird you out, maybe you want to watch this.
Or not. (Blame Mrs.Giggles)

Coping with the day job

Reading Scalzi’s great posts on making a living as a writer got me to thinking about the worst piece of career advice I ever got:

“Take some brainless low-paying job just to make ends meet so you can devote all your creative energy to work on your writing.”

Do me a favor, next time someone utters this, or something similar, to you, slap them. Hard.

The people making this asinine comment are either justifying their slacker attitude at their 7-11 gig, or are just in love with the image of the artist struggling for their art.

Bullshit.

First off, if you undervalue yourself for a third of every day, you’re going to undervalue yourself as a writer. Also, nothing saps writing energy as much as stress about money, food and shelter. Dreading waking up to go to the daily grind will not make you excited or give you more energy for the writing. Also, if you’re placed in the position of relying too much on a low income writing (voice of experience here) you can severely sabotage your writing career. If you have a decent income at a decent job, one you enjoy, you are in a much better position to see the merits of any offers that do come in.

Say someone offers you two grand for world rights and a film option on your 150,000 word epic fantasy. It’s a lot harder to say "no" to a horrid offer like that if your paychecks come from Burger King, rather than Google. (See prior comment about undervaluing yourself.)

You want to be a successful writer? Get a day job you like and that you’re good at. The worst that could happen is that you’re a bigger success at that. So what? If you make more money in IT, or sales, or real estate, than you do with your novel, it doesn’t make you a lesser writer.

To paraphrase General Patton, “Your job isn’t to suffer for your art. It’s to make the other guy suffer for his.” Or, ah, something like that.

Tomorrow's economy.

I've gone on at length about the replicator economy, what will happen to commerce as the cost of "stuff" goes to zero and the ability to copy anything becomes ubiquitous. Understanding the implications of this is going to make the difference between success and failure for whole industries. It also will help in drafting a post-Singularity tale that has logical economics. Well, I came across an absolutely magnificent article by Kevin Kelly on The Technium on exactly what you can sell when copies (of everything) are free. The premise is simple: if copies are ubiquitous, copies are worthless, so we trade in what cannot be copied. Think about that long enough, and you can leverage yourself out of the 19th century widget box much of the western world is still trapped in, and achieve, zen -like, an economy independent of things. This is the kind of article that will make an RIAA executive's head explode.

Book spamming for the Lord!

Today I got a new book spam. This has come to me via Media E-Blast, a company whose name was coined by someone in a desperate attempt to make unsolicited spam and e-mail harvesting all respectable and Web 2.0ish.

Here's my first piece of advice: Paying some "consultant" to make you a fancy JPEG ad and send it to a "carefully targeted" e-mail list doesn't make you look any better than someone using broken English to peddle erectile-dysfunction medication. Just because they can use Photoshop and have a mailing address in the continental US doesn't make it less sleazy, it just means it's a little less likely they're using hijacked zombie PCs as mail servers. (Mmmm zombies. . .)

Second bit of advice: If you're self-published, seriously consider paying someone else to write your ad copy. If you rely on borderline ludicrous sentence constructions like,

"Sleepless nights, anxiety attacks, drug or alcoholic addiction, sexual addiction, murder, losing a loved one, broken marriages, are many things that we sometimes face."

your only market will be among the kind of masochists that buy awful prose with the specific intention of mocking it.

Third bit of advice: Don't lie in the subject line of the e-mail and pimp your work as "Warren Caldwell's #1 Best Seller." It really looks bad, especially for a minister whose selling his "life-changing testimony." Here's a little clue: those lists in the New York Times, those books? No spam involved. That should tell you something.

Fourth bit of advice: No one likes large unsolicited JPEG attachments. Most are porn, and I like to solicit my own porn, thank you very much.

Last bit of advice: Never use the phrase, "I stripped down to nakedness to share my most inner self," in a spam that lands in the same folder as all the penis enlargement ads. We don't need that mental image.

An idea whose time has passed

According to Reuters, Random House is trying an experiment:

Random House ... is planning to test selling individual chapters of a popular book to gauge reader demand. [They] will sell the six chapters and epilogue of "Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die" for $2.99 each according to the report.

First: e-books have been around for years, and authors have been putting out samples on the net for ages. Not new, or innovative.

Second: it makes no sense. iTunes can bust up albums because, with very few exceptions, each track on a CD represents a standalone piece of work. Unless the book is an anthology or collection of essays, chapters themselves won't stand alone. $1 for complete work > $3 for incomplete work.

Third: who's the market for this idea? Why would someone pay three bucks for one seventh of a book when you can get the whole thing from Amazon for 16.47?

Fourth: what do you do when your more savvy competitors give out samples for free?

This strikes me as someone either a) trying to make a bad analogy with the iTunes business model or b) the person in charge of the implementation hates the idea and is making sure it tanks before it gets off the ground.

[Thanks to Dear Author.]

Attack of the muse: redux

So I finished and turned in the Prophets draft. My next project is Wolfbreed #2 (Still need titles for those) but I can't really start until Anne at Bantam gets back to me, approving the outline for the next book. Since I didn't want to jump into the next Apotheosis book and have to interrupt it, I was just taking a short break. . .

My Muse didn't like that. Like the attack that resulted in Wolfbreed #1, I was sitting, minding my own business, and my muse bitch-slapped me with an idea I just had to start on. As of right now, after about four days, I have nearly 10K words. It's deja vu all over again.

I even went and added a counter for it.

Seek, and ye shall find (not)

Periodically I check out what people are Googling when they come across my site. Sometimes it makes sense (all the folks checking up on Cassie Edwards, for instance) but often, it, well, doesn't. . .

• “jack off bud stories”
• “godzila porno mouvi”
• “pink butt”
• “pink microsoft”
• “dark cats”
• “stupid plagiarism ferrets”
• “hungry xxx.com”

And this week's asshat is...

Hong Kong Actor Edison Chen. Who, through a critical mass of sleaze and stupidity worthy of certain toe-taping senators is embroiled in an internet sex scandal. Apparently Mr. Chen liked to watch himself, so he took pictures of himself getting busy with a bunch of actresses. Ok, I'm a Libertarian, I don't have a problem with consenting adults filming themselves.

My problem with Mr. Chen starts with the fact that he apparently liked to share these pictures without the consent of his partners, and worse, he had the bonehead stupidity to leave these 1000+ dirty pictures on his laptop's hard-drive (God does that sound dirty) when he sent it in to get it serviced. (Eww, that's even worse.)

Here's a clue to all you celebs out there. The techs working on your computer are going to look at your photos— You're a fucking celebrity!

So these photos found their way on to the internet, and Chen's all dumbfounded, first denying it all ("they're all photoshopped!") and now all tearful and apologetic saying, "The lives of many innocent people have been hurt by this malicious and criminal conduct and in this regard I'm filled with pain, hurt and frustration." The malicious conduct he refers to in this case is posting the pics on the web. And the fact that he includes himself with the "innocent victims" is just gag inducing.

(Thanks to Mrs Giggles.)

5 Things LOST can teach us about storytelling

Because I am not going to post about "Super Tuesday" I've decided to celebrate the return of my favorite TV series. Lost has, IMO, managed to do just about everything right so far, and the premiere last Thursday seems to indicate that this won't change. As a fan since the pilot episode, I thought I'd delve into the series so far and highlight some of the storytelling elements within that are worth emulating:

1. Sell the little things and your audience will buy the big things: One of the things Lost does well is pay attention to detail. Even things that, at first, would seem like continuity errors are explained later on: The food supply in the hatch is a good example, it was clearly not enough food to last for years, but then later on, there was a food drop. The anachronistic washer/dryer set was actually a clue that there had been contact with the hatch later than the 1980s. The plane found in the first season with the faux priests actually formed part of the backstory of one of the major tail-section passengers. This attention to detail actually adds verisimilitude to the batshit crazy stuff that's yet to be explained. (Smoke Monster anyone?)
   


2. Suspense comes from foreknowledge: One of the major arcs of the last half of last season was about Desmond seeing visions of Charlie's death, something that was arguably foreshadowed in the first season. When Charlie goes down into the Looking Glass station, not only are we expecting him to die, he's expecting to die. Even though both us and the characters saw this coming miles away, it still makes for a powerful scene: even in retrospect, seeing the character's this season react to his sacrifice.
   


3. Complicated stories require predictable structures: Lost is a rat's nest of conspiracy, conflicting motivations, shifting relationships, and backstory, backstory, backstory. . . One of the only ways it keeps the whole from becoming completely unintelligible is by adhering to a very rigid structure. Not just the alternation of flashbacks and island time, but in the narrative uses of each. Up to now, with only two exceptions I can think of, the flashbacks were character studies, more or less narratively self-contained, and could cover an arbitrary amount of time. The island segments are explicitly linear, and are home to the major multi-episode narrative arcs of the Lost storyline. That's oversimplified (especially now we've seemed to have crossed a temporal Rubicon and are into flashforwards now) but the point is, after two or three episodes, the structure is apparent and provides a framework to keep the audience form becoming disoriented in the complex multi-character multi-era story.
   


4. The argument's more interesting when both sides are equally "right." John and Jack have been at odds throughout the whole series, and it stands only to get worse as things progress. What makes the conflict interesting is that neither man is completely in the right. While it's clear John Locke has some connection to the Island and may, in fact, be closer to the "truth" than Jack Shepherd, he is clearly not infallible and, in his way, is as arrogant as Jack is. Jack is clearly trying to do right, and is doing the logical and sensible thing, but some things he just don't get.
   


5. Plant your seeds early: One of the things that gives a narrative a sense of unity is how strongly later elements tie to earlier ones. in other words, what's happening now in a story isn't just a result of the last scene, but also develops out of events in the first few chapters/episodes, or helps to explain them. The last season actually involved fewer new mysteries, and spent much of its time explaining the older ones: Why Claire was kidnapped? WTF Polar Bears? What happened to the Dharma Initiative? Why's Ben such an asshole? I suspect, as we progress, the ratio of questions raised to questions answered should continue to reverse itself, and I suspect the nature of the Smoke Monster (the first big question) will be the last one answered.
   

Turns out, Bob's not all that happy to see you

I suppose this will come as a surprise to everyone, but apparently Bob's been duped. All that Enzyte he's been taking hasn't done squat to enhance his maleness. In fact, according to the Cincinati Enquirer, when former Enzyte exec James Teegarden Jr. got before a judge:

He said employees of the Forest Park company created fictitious doctors to endorse the pills, fabricated a customer satisfaction survey and made up numbers to back up claims about Enzyte’s effectiveness.

“So all this is a fiction?” Judge S. Arthur Spiegel asked about some of the claims.
“That’s correct, your honor,” Teegarden said.

Wow, you mean they lied? Who knew?

Signing Books

For those interested, and who're in the area:

I'll be signing books at the Gray & Co. booth @ the Cleveland Home & Garden Show at the IX Center (directions) on 2/8/08 from 7:00pm to 8:00pm.

BOOTH LOCATION
Booth #379. Enter from the West Entrance. Head to the left
throgh the fountain area towards the Bella Italia Bistro (or follow
Aisle 300 to CBG Cleveland Magazine Feature booth). Head towards the
GardenArea, we will be the last booth on the left (after Cleveland
Magine, and WDOK; across from Petiti's Garden Stage) before you
enter the Garden Area -- Next to Garden G1 for Soeder Landscaping.

Now I wish I collected baseball cards

Thanks to The Smoking Gun website, I now know that Tops is including presidential candidate trading cards in their sets of baseball cards. . .

I didn't want to know this existed

But now that I do, I'll share: American Idol Slashfic.

I wonder if I should be worried that this doesn't really surprise me?