The Known Unknowns

Between my own experiences in the industry and the years I've spent participating in various industry blogs (pubrants, the Bransford, etc.), I am not too worried about what will come after I get an agent and sell a book. Or at least, I feel like I have a pretty solid understanding of most aspects.

Except one. The next book. Sure agents talk about the challenges of a sophomore offering and the effort people put into it and the mistakes people make because of the pressure and blah blah blah. All fine and good. I can't speak to pressure until I'm feeling it and I can't feel the pressure of a sophomore book until I've published the freshman one.

What I don't know about the next book is the next book to the agent. I've heard so many conflict things and agents seem to rarely speak on that part of the process. I've heard proposal used as the nonfiction alternative to a query, but then I've also heard it as what a represented author sends his/her agent for new story ideas. And pardon me, but a proposal sounds like a query and by god, I never want to query again once I get an agent.

I've also seen some authors that send the agent an outline. An outline? I don't outline. I never outline. I took half a page of notes yesterday and that's HUGE. I'm a pantser. I write by the seat of my pants. I write by the seat of my pants so much that there are holes in the seat of my pants from all the writing I do there. I can tell you the beginning (though it might change) and the ending (though it might change) and maybe a few ideas of the middle (though they might change). How the hell do you expect me to write an outline? That will destroy my process?!?!?!

So yeah, this is a known unknown. I get representation for, let's say, THE TRIAD SOCIETY. I already have two other novels that did not attract an agent. Given some blog posts, I think he or she might read them just as a matter of form and tell me if they can be revised to publishable quality or just need to be permanently shelved. But I'm also finishing a new wip right now and will have another one in a few months. What do I do with those?

And I even read once that an author would pitch a book to the agent before it's written and if the agent said no, the author might not even write the thing. I don't think I've ever written a book that was so much like my original proposal as it was when it was finished. Not writing it at all seems like a horrible presumption. And even if that's a good method, I write two novels a year. Can't I just write one of whatever I want and one that gets a thumbs up? I mean, some people take five years to write a book, so I can see why it might be important to figure out its saleability beforehand. I wrote THE TRIAD SOCIETY in three months (to the day1). I'll write ten novels in the time that other guy writes one, so can't I write the quirky thing that I love even if no one else will?

Some of this is probably exaggeration, but this really is the one topic I've never seen covered on any of the blogs I follow.


1 Actual writing time was less, as I started on May 25th and I took off most of June because I was working my ass off at my really real job. I finished the first draft on August 25th, though, and I think that's pretty awesome.

Let's Talk About Sex

Tiffany Reisz is one of Sara Megibow's erotica authors. She wrote a guest post for Fiction Groupie that just blew me away, so I thought I would bring it to your attention.

Now, as a liberal adult, I have been instructed to be open about sex, and I am. So is my wife. We're cool like that. But this post gave me pause because really, few people I know, liberal or otherwise, are comfortable talking about sex, certainly so if it involves a discussion with more than one person. Impossibly so if someone under 20 is in the room and we are doing anything but an instructional lecture of the dangers of sex.

Yeah, not so much.

The specific comment that Tiffany made that I found so profound was:

Really?  I’m the only adult who has ever told a super smart beautiful young woman that sex was good?  That’s troubling.  Sex IS good. Why is that a secret? Marriage is good too. Nobody hides that fact from kids. Nobody thinks that by telling a fourteen year old girl that marriage is good, that fourteen year old is going to run out and immediately get married. So why all the secrecy? Why all the shame? I want her to know sex is good so she’ll know it’s worth taking seriously, it’s worth thinking about, it’s worth doing right.

Dear lord yes! I've known this and have expressed this but never articulated it in such a simple but powerful manner. Anyone that says sex is bad or shameful is either a liar or doing it wrong. This right here is how you communicate the importance of sex, safe sex, self-respect, and respecting others. This is going to be an awesome part of your life, so pay attention.

Kudos to Tiffany.

The Drawl

I've mentioned before that I've been struggling on voice with JEHOVAH'S HITLIST. It's not so much struggling as I can't find it. It's struggling in that I keep changing my mind, so the narrative text is horribly inconsistent.

Here's where I've been flipping. Take a nice classic rural drawl. Change of to a, drop the Gs off of ING (remindin' me a somethin'), swap was/were (he were/they was), add 'n to the ends of certain words (if'n), and the like.

At first this was only dialogue, but a lot of narrative text focuses on Jehovah's thought process. We think the same way we speak. Someone's grammar doesn't magically improve just because they're speaking instead of thinking. But that's easier to choose to do than to actually do.

For one thing, a lot of us drop the G off of ING anyway, but seeing the apostrophe makes us slow down and identify what's missing. That can be a big distraction when reading narrative text, so that switched back to normal ING. The next was the was/were relationship. I've tried to maintain this, but no matter how actively you write your verbs, you'll still use WAS more than any other, sometimes multiple times in the same sentence. What was quaint and distinct to begin with became burdensome and distracting.

Jehovah were certain he'd a seen such a thing afore. The last'n had kill't Lil' Petey and ate off Rick Rick's right foot. That all made no nevermind here.

Quaint. Distinct. But for 90,000 words? I just don't know.

Speaking of 90,000 words: I'm usually one that says the book is as long as the book needs to be, but seeing just how depressed the sci-fi1 market is, this isn't something I want to thumb my nose at. The thing is, I thought I was coming in too short somewhere around 35k and kind of fleshed things out. I'll have to go back and chop some of that out because I'm actually at risk of going over 90k, which I'm using as a hard ceiling for this book.

Approaching the end, I reached the book's thesis statement. The exchange includes more than one racial epithet. And while both the character and the setting make it an appropriate word choice, as a writer, it is SO hard to include. A thousand and one times I started to just scrap the entire chapter, but forced myself to finish it. It still makes my skin crawl, though.


1 And in terms of genre, I wanted to bring up dystopian fiction, but will do so in a separate post later after I've gotten some work done. Interesting things. There will be questions, so all a you that have been quiet lately prepare yourselves to comment. :)

No Sympathy for Bookstores

The general premise is that if you want to be a writer, you should buy books whenever you can, whether they are for yourself or gifts for others (this sentiment most often comes up around Christmas). I don't have a problem with this, to be honest. Support the business you work in. Makes sense to me.

This then moves on to the "and buy at your local independent bookstores." There are a lot of assertions to be made about the benefits of independent bookstores versus national chains and online purchasing. These claims are almost always made by people who live in large cities (notably New York) where independent stores like the Tattered Cover have well established their awesomeness1.

For the rest of the country, the reality of the independent bookstore doesn't call for such unprecedented love. Of all the small towns I've lived in (five in three different states), the independent bookstore is much the same: used books, limited selection, disorganized or poorly defined space, a limited new release section that only includes names like Grisham or King, and prices set at full value or higher. In my current town, there are two independent bookstores, both conforming to this description. They open at 10 and close at 4, so even if I felt obligated to patronize them, I would have to take a day off of work to do so.

Not growing up in a place like New York where an independent bookstore might have a large enough market to survive the B&N onslaught, I am not enamored with the notion of the underdog2. Now don't get me wrong, I don't dislike them. There are stores like the Tattered Cover that have so well established themselves that people can mention them online and others know exactly what they're talking about. Two thumbs up for those places. It's the presumed obligation that rubs me wrong. A business needs to earn my business. If you cannot provide me the book I'm looking for at an hour in which I am able to patronize without requiring vacation spent, you won't get my dollars.

Not that the large chains are doing any better. My experiences with the last two paper books I've purchased have been miserable. I skipped my hometown Borders and B&N and went to the Borders on Boylston in Boston. This is one of the better Borders in the country, so I should be able to find Tad Williams' new release, SHADOWHEART, without much difficulty.

...or so I thought. The book wasn't on coop or on the shelf. There wasn't even space made for it on the shelf. The first three employees ignored me, talking to themselves. The fourth one had never heard of it but was able to confirm that they had six in stock. It ended up being on a cart because it hadn't been shelves yet. What kind of store doesn't have new releases shelved the day they're supposed to be released? When I worked at Blockbuster, Tuesday new releases were shelved Monday night after closing like any common sense business would.

If I had purchased the book online, it would have been delivered today and for $13 less than what I paid for it at Borders. This brings me to the fundamental aspect of book shopping in any store, whether you're a local indie or a national chain:

You have to earn my business.

Amazon is the big bad wolf because that's how we roll in America. If you're the biggest, you're evil. Support the little guy. Fist in the air. Do the right thing. Go to your local independent bookstore and give them your business.

I don't give any business charity. If a local bookstore earns my business, it's on them and good luck to them. That's the kind of place I'll support and speak well of (and often--have you seen how many times I reference Jackie's Diner on my website?). Spare me the guilt trip. I was raised Catholic. It doesn't work.

I really wish Nashua (or even downtown Boston) had a place like the Tattered Cover. There's an antique bookshop near where I work, but that doesn't do much for me. Otherwise, it's online purchasing or continued bad experiences with the national chains (I ranted on twitter what happened when I tried to buy Bujold's CRYOBURN, so I won't repeat that, but it was even more annoying than this time around).

More so than ever, I am pleased with my decision to go e-only in my book purchases3.


1 I lived near the Tattered Cover when I lived in Denver. It is indeed awesome.

2 Which is weird, because usually I'm a sucker for an underdog.

3 SHADOWHEART is the last in the Shadowmarch tetralogy, so this should be the last paper book I buy, depending on how much farther Bujold takes the Vorkosigan series.

Grooving

Things on JEHOVAH'S HITLIST slowed down for a couple weeks. It occurred to me that I was fast approaching maximum word count and the pacing was too slow. I also was bored as a writer, which means I'll probably be bored as a reader. I pushed through what I had and sped things up. That has yielded some fresh and fun ideas (I love making iconic secondary character types1). I am now grooving along. Jehovah is about to go up above to which the book will end when he returns.

Since my wind sprint on THE SEVENTH SACRIFICE, I have decided that will be my next work. If complete, it should also be my largest book to date. I will revise the first chapter with some suggestions from Nate Wilson and move on to chapter 2 which is already percolating in my brain. Hopefully that will get the ball rolling and will yield an awesome fantasy story2.

Yay for writing. If this all goes to plan, I should be starting the new wip the week before or the week of Christmas.


1 In TTS it was the Triad Society itself. In JH it is the tinkers. ... in fact, in the first draft of 7Sac, it was a completely different type of tinker3. In Wanted it was the Baker Boys and in BM/BBQ it was Cyrus the cat.

2 I'm making a genuine effort to include magic in this one too. Huh, woulda thunk it, magic in a fantasy book!

3 It started with a genuine intention to get certain themes I like into a published book. Since the previous book wasn't selling, I might keep something for the new work. What happens is you can draw a dot-to-dot of my manuscripts where I've taken something (like tinkers) and reimagined it in a new world. I kind of enjoy it.

The Roast Beef Sandwich...FROM HELL!

I held onto this comment because I wanted to maintain the positivity of Thanksgiving, my second-favorite holiday of the year. Five days later, it's still such a wild ride that I'd feel horrible not sharing it with you.

It is Wednesday evening, the night before Thanksgiving, and my wife has been preparing various foodstuffs for our forthcoming celebration. I've been cleaning and organizing and making pumpkin pie. As meal time gets closer, we decide that we do not want to cook. We've already been doing that. It's time for delivery! There is a nearby restaurant called Giovanni's Roast Beef and Pizza that I had been to a couple times before. While the service had been a bit scattershot, the food was absolutely delicious. I had spoken of it and Jen was in the mood for a sammich of some kind. We decided to order here and continue with our preparations rather than picking it up.

This was our first mistake Giovanni's is right down the street from us. I'm not exaggerating that. I can walk there. It's a three minute drive and half of that is spent at red lights. But delivery is convenient because the pie is in the oven and boxes are being brought out of the basement so we can be fully prepared for our Black Friday tree trimming. We'd pay the few dollars extra for delivery.

The order goes in! A Texas chicken melt sub (marinated chicken, cheese, pepper, mushroom, and barbecue sauce) and a gyro (not from a Greek place, and as such not as good as it could have been).

Ordering was a task. After being put on hold for a considerable length of time, the person had trouble taking down my address. Drury. This is a challenging word. On the phone it can sound like Drrrry. Of course, when you spell it. Three times. And the person says "D?" that's not a good sign. I might have complained to the manager if the person I was speaking to was not the manager.

I had hoped that being down the street might expedite the time we waited, but to no avail. 45 minutes later, the driver showed up. No problem. I'm sure other people had the same idea. I take the slip and sign my name, giving a fair tip. Ummm...excuse me miss, who's the pizza for? She hands me a pizza and a bag that in no way feels like it has two sandwiches in it. She realizes she has the wrong order and makes a big show of being upset and embarrassed. This is where I make another mistake. She seems so genuinely upset in delivering the wrong order, I give her the signed slip back when she says she'll run back and get the right food.

She doesn't do this. She instead calls and gets the address for the order she had and delivers that instead. Twenty-five minutes later, she returns to the store. I know this because I'm on the phone asking how it can possibly have taken this long to go down the street and back to get my food. She says that she delivered our food. Oh no you didn't!

This results in a fun back and forth with the manager (yes, the woman that couldn't spell Drury) and she says she's going to make our food again and send it back out. Thirty minutes later, we call again, at this point, if we hadn't paid for our food, we would have abandoned the attempt and made our own meal at home. I have also started and baked an entire pumpkin pie. We're on the phone, explaining once again that the first driver never delivered our food and that she's a horrible liar, especially since I gave her a flipping tip. The food comes. The manager stays on the phone to make sure it's the right food. It is the right food! And it's still warm! Finally. Let me off the phone so I can go eat. ...what? you hope I enjoy the complementary onion rings? (At this point, they had made no effort to make amends for the bad service.) We didn't get any onion rings. The driver was supposed to give us onion rings? Well, he didn't. He must have kept them for himself. Whatever, I don't care. I want to eat.

I drops the shades, lock the front door, and away to the basement to continue watching the second season of Lie to Me (an awesome show based on real science). I'm just about to eat when the phone rings again. This time it's the owner. He wants to know what's been happening. He says that the guy did try to deliver the onion rings and that I locked the door in his face. Well, given that he neither rang the doorbell nor knocked. I don't know why you would call back and accuse me of being rude. It certainly doesn't make me want to forgive you. And that, I assumed, was the last straw. I tell him I don't care whether the driver tried to deliver me onion rings or not. I cannot think to patronize their store again. Total time for delivery of the correct food was 2 hours and 25 minutes. This included no less than 6 phone calls to and from the store to which three of them accused me for being at fault.

The food, incidentally, was delicious. At least mine was. Jen realized you have to get Greek food from Greek restaurants, but it was at least passable, and Lie to Me continued to rock, so we could just let that all get behind us. Really, if they had just said sorry (or better yet, refunded my money), I'd continue to go there. The food really is that good (and you may say, just pick it up, but the first time I did that, they let me stand at the counter for ten minutes before anyone even spoke to me).

But yay, it's over! Or so we thought.

The next morning I open the door to go down to Boston to pick up my niece for Thanksgiving dinner. What do I find but a greasy bag of onion rings that was left on our doorstep overnight.

How this place remains in business, I cannot fathom. The events of the evening are not exaggerated for the retelling and even now, I cannot believe they happened. Or more precisely, continued to happen. I worked pizza. I delivered. I know the crazy shit that can happen. But 2 hours and 25 minutes later, they had only managed to make things worse, and I woke up in the morning with the food-equivalent of a flaming bag of dog shit at my front door.

The absurdity of it all makes me laugh. I will miss their food, though. Too bad I'll never go there again.

Living the Dark Crystal

First, yesterday was awesome. My niece began her freshman year at Boston University, and the person with whom she was going to have Thanksgiving dinner bailed. Which meant she ended up at my place. I've never had the opportunity to hang with her without one of her parents around and this is the first time she met her Aunt Jen. It's amazing how squared away this young woman is. If she's the future, things are going to be awesome.

A post I wanted to make the other day, but I wanted to make it with a video example that I cannot locate. You've seen the Dark Crystal. (This is not a question. You have seen it. If you have not seen it, stop reading right now and go watch it. Don't come back until you're finished.) The skeksi that is banished, Chamberlain (the one who has the always-identifiable whine), is trying to lure Jen into his clutches one last time. He starts begging:

Please? Please come down. Please? Please?! PLEASE?!

Knowing an agent I would love (LOVE) to work with is currently reading my full manuscript and may (or may not) offer representation? Yeah, I have those moments. I just want to shout in as shrill a Chamberlain voice as I can manage PLEASE?!?!?!

Then I get a grip and go back to my writing, but for those few seconds, ugh. I hope for the best which makes me fear the worst.

Hellloooooo (Male) Nurse!



Just to be fare to all the readers out there after yesterday's Julia Stiles pic, I totally have a man-crush on Nathan Fillion. He is, was, and always will be Captain Malcolm Reynolds. My obsession with Firefly is total1 and despite the days where he spams my twitter account trying to make a fad (the double-rainbow thing got pretty extreme for awhile), he's still the guy I'd ask to dinner if given the opportunity2.

Try and find Mal's pistol in the above picture. That made me geek out.


1 Someone left a note under my windshield wiper that says "Shiny" because my license plate says Browncoat. I kept the note. :)

2 We'd totally make out just so I could say we did. My wife would then make out with me even harder so she could say that she made out with Nathan Fillion via proxy.

That was EPIC!

The fastest way to start a literary nerd fight? Say X fantasy book is/is not epic fantasy. Epic fantasy may be the poorest defined genre currently being published1. I think this is a result of the '80s/'90s where almost all fantasy published was epic fantasy. Epic fantasy was so pervasive within the genre that epic fantasy = fantasy. There wasn't a heaping of sword and sorcery or just plain old fashioned fantasy. Which leads to the confusion today of what counts as epic.

It would be nice to be able to say that the definition remains the same and it's just the education of the audience that is lacking, but nerd fights over genre boundaries always end up challenging the fundamental nature of epic's definition.

Epic used to be matter of scope. The threat was world-threatening and the journey was world-spanning. The stakes were the highest they could be ("evil power rises and destroys the world!!!!") and the hero would leave his modest beginnings to distant lands never dreamed of to return a changed person ("I was a prince this entire time and no one told me!"). Most often epic fantasy is said to be the genre that models itself after the Hero's Journey.

These are where the challenges come in. If the threat is to the microcosm of the protagonist's world, isn't that just as great as the entire world being threatened? And to travel across the breadth of that microcosm, isn't that the same as traveling across the entire world?

What gets me about these kinds of challenges is the imperativeness that such focused stories be quantified as epic fantasy. It's an innate desire of a fantasy author to be compared to the icons of the craft, those authors that inspired us to pick up a pen in our youths. And with the exception of Robert E. Howard, all those authors are epic fantasists. Tolkien, Goodkind, Jordan, Williams. All of them published tomes of work that devastated their worlds and enthralled ours.

If we don't write epic fantasy, how can we be as good (or better!) than they were? So everything we write has to be epic, even if that means we need a hammer to drive the peg into that hole.

I don't think it's the definition of epic that is in question, but our own psychological need to be compared to our heroes that fuels the epic argument. But there are some fuzzy lines. Someone suggested that Harry Potter was an epic fantasy. After I stopped my gut reaction of "nuh uh!"2, I began to question whether or not that was possible. Harry certainly has a Hero's Journey. He travels to new worlds, and Voldemort wants to destroy the entire world, wizard and muggle alike. But really, the distance Harry travels is very minimal. Not even the breadth of the British Isles. That lends itself to the epic nature of a microcosm adventure.

As I ponder that, I wonder, does it matter? It's easy to define the Lord of the Rings trilogy as epic. Memory, Sorry, and Thorn. A Song of Ice and Fire. There is no pondering there. Those are EPIC, in every measure of the genre. But can't there be just a regular fantasy genre? Lois McMaster Bujold's CURSE OF CHALLION I call fantasy instead of epic fantasy. It's good fantasy, but not world spanning or world threatening. The fact that it is not epic fantasy does not diminish the quality of the story.

So in the end, I don't have an absolute argument. I can certainly pick out the easy ones. But the middle gray area is open to discussion. In the end, I come down to "How much does it really matter?" Perhaps its just a matter of ego and not a matter of importance.


1 Other than literary fiction which focuses more on language and depth rather than any kind of genre hierarchy. I did not say literary was the poorest defined genre because a lot of genre books that publishers don't want to pigeonhole into that genre end up in literary rather than the appropriate genre in an attempt to widen the target market. As such, it is disqualified for cheating.

2 Can a YA story also be an epic fantasy story? YA is more a demographic than a true genre. Same with middle grade. It informs some choices that will be present in regard to swearing and sex and (supposedly) violence. But otherwise, YA is actually an adjective. YA fantasy, YA mystery, etc. There's no reason HP can't be YA epic fantasy. But then, you don't normally see epic fantasy tagged onto a modern fantasy setting. That usually lends itself to urban fantasy. Plenty of fodder for argument all around.

Stranger in a Strange Land

It's a fair bet most of your writer friends aren't your real-world friends. They're online. The internet has been a terrific tool for us to gather and discuss and be. You may have been trapped previously with those that said they wanted to write, but whose offerings amounted to nothing more than literary masturbation, taking their favorite D&D characters and expostulating their awesomeness in prose. (If you were lucky, it would at least be good prose. But how often are we that lucky?)

Now, we can find people with similar interests and similar talent to share our ideas and our fears. We can push one another to do better and help each other to succeed. This is all great. Thank you Internet for your participation in our growth as writers.

But at the end of the day, we're still writers in our own world. We do other things like read books and watch movies with friends who may have little to no writing talent or interest in exploring the craft. But they still have opinions. Everyone has opinions. And they share them. They share them with you.

I'll see a movie and someone will say how much they liked it and I pray that they don't ask me what I thought. Or, if they're going to ask me that question, they do so before they offer their own opinion so they can see quickly that I'm not just going to say I liked something because a bus blew up or some thing. I do not have a switch. I cannot turn off being a writer. I can dial it down. I can take it from an 11 to about an 8 or so, but in the end, the writing is important to me. Transformers 2: Rise of the Fallen is utter rubbish. I don't care if the point of the movie was to have big robots fight and blow shit up. You can make a movie with big robots fighting blowing shit up and still write it in such a fashion that when you walk into a building in Washington, you don't exit into an African desert!

I'm told I'm too negative. I don't think I'm negative. I think I'm critical. I challenge the art I am interested in to be the best it can be. My measure for that quality is based on my own understanding of writing, which, compared to the rest of my friends, is much higher (immodest or not, it's the truth and most of them would admit to that).

I did a podcast interview with Scott Wegener, the artist for Atomic Robo. This best explained what it's like being a creative person. When he looks at something, the first thing he looks at is the visual aspect. He's a comic book artist. He draws for a living. The visuals are important. Likewise, the first thing I look at is the writing. I can give a pass to average visuals because that's now what I do.

It can feel very isolating in those discussions, especially in a larger group, when people are giving a thumbs up and thumbs down based solely on a visceral reaction to the spectacle of the movie, and all you want to do is grab a red pen and mark up all the holes that to you seemed so glaring.

Don't worry. You're not alone. Your people, they're here on the internets.

Finding New Meaning in Old Emotions

A scenario. Your character has:

Given up professional and post-graduate dreams to aid a friend
Moved to a new city to aid said friend
Then been let down by said friend
Which resulted in the loss of your character's entire circle of friends, who had really been said friend's friends
Only speaks to his ex-fiancee every few weeks, which only reminds him of what he lost
Earns less 1/3 less than the national poverty average

It is:

Your character's birthday
Your character is at dinner alone
No one has called to wish him a happy birthday

Your character's mood is _________


The quick and easy answer is depressed or sad or any other negative emotion. Emotions are tricky things because it's easy to use them like Venn diagrams. A person is ________ (happy!) or __________ (sad :() and regardless of where they fall in that little circle of a diagram, they are that emotion. People don't usually work that way. You can be sad at success and happy when you've failed. We're a mercurial people and our ability to want more and to attempt more and to achieve more is pretty astounding. So when you're putting your character through a dramatic ringer, slow down and ask yourself if maybe there's another reaction to be had. Maybe the opposite of your first reaction is both plausible and a fresh take on an established subject.

In the case of the scenario above, that was my life in 2001 and 2002. My birthday was my favorite time of the year. Not because it was my special "me" day. My mom hadn't made my birthday special since I was 8 or so. No, it was special because I made $7000/year in 2001 and it was the one day out of the year I splurged on a steak. I walked down the street to a place called Scooters. I ordered a steak (medium well), steak fries, and a two-fingered scotch neat. My birthday was steak day, and for those couple hours sitting in that restaurant, the hardships of the world stopped at the door. In what was one of the most difficult times of my life, that one day was the happiest day of the year.

(Of course, it doesn't hold a candle to any of the 365 days I live now, but I got my shit together. Now I have steak whenever I want.)

It's good for a laugh, at least.

This is a query I submitted1 to one (and only one) agency for my first novel, BLACK MAGIC AND BARBECUE SAUCE. I repost it here as a lesson for you all. How not to get an agent:


Attention humans

I am Cyrus the Conqueror. I am not Mr. Whiskers. I am not Kitty the Conqueror. And I am most asuredly not Wittle Whiskers the Wonkerer. If you must speak, address me as your majesty, as you should every cat whose presence you are fortunate enough to be in. It has come to my attention that one of your ilk had the good sense to include me in his manuscript. I will overlook the fact that he did not ask my permission. The quality is such that to execute him would be a waste of human talent, what little your species possesses.

The story does not focus on me, and I am thankful for it. It is unlikely a book could adequately capture the wondrous life a cat leads. No, this monkey scrawl focuses on one of your own, Cy Lekkas. He is extraordinary in comparison to the rest of you and not just because he buys me gormet cat food. He can speak to me in the majestic language of cats, not that gutter language you use. He can speak to other things as well, doors, stoves, ceilings, anything really. He is called a Speaker. His kind has been known to my people for millennia. They live forever, speak in tongues, and eat strange foods that fuel their powers.

They are still humans despite themselves, and monkeys will be monkeys. They play games, steal from one another, beat their chests, and fight. Really, if you hadn't shed so much of your fur, I don't know if I could tell you apart. It seems that Cy stole a pearl from another Speaker, Christian, who then sold the pearl to antoher Speaker, Seth, who discovered it a fraud. Seth demanded that Christian find Cy and retrieve the pearl, hence the fall of dominos that lead to action-packed fights, daring rescues, and an epic faceoff of immortals. I watched the whole thing from the top of my couch and was quite impressed.

The whole thing is 110,000 words. How a human assembled 110,000 coherent words, I do not know. But there it is. He calls it contemporary fantasy and titled it BLACK MAGIC AND BARBECUE SAUCE. His name is Joe Selby, and he has written coherent words before. Perhaps he is a genetic anomoly. His ten-minute play was produced in Sioux Falls, SD, as a finalist in the Kennedy Center ACTF. He wrote the role-playing rule book, Dangerous Denizens for Kenzer & Co. in 2003. And he wrote 33 role-playing adventuures for Kenzer & Co. and Wizards of the Coast. This will be his first commercial novel. I am told he also follows your blog. I do not see the appeal. Your inclusion of a dog marks it as an inferior endeavor. Perhaps if you were to feature a cat, you might garner some success. I may be willing to make an appearance if your tribute is worthy.

That is all.


Your benevolent feline overlord

Cyrus the Conqueror

on behalf of
Joseph L. Selby


1 In case you were wondering, yes, this is the query with which I set my rejection speed personal record.